there’s a great pressure, way down in the earth, that pushes the crude near to the surface on it’s own. it’s pushing up against the bottom of the underlying rock source. do we have reason to believe it will ever stop doing that?
there’s a great pressure, way down in the earth, that pushes the crude near to the surface on it’s own. it’s pushing up against the bottom of the underlying rock source. do we have reason to believe it will ever stop doing that?
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I’m no expert. I can tell you that there are some who believe that crude doesn’t come from the dinosaurs and cretaceous plankton but rather from internal earth processes. might be I don’t know. current thinking is that there’s just a lot of oil in the ground but most of it is not commercially addressable. that is for various reasons its too expensive to extract. in the last 150 years the oil men have extracted 10% of the oil in the ground. the current fracking revolution may extract another 3-15 percent of the oil in the ground.
To the extent that oil pushes to the surface it is largely lost. The great fields of Saudi Arabia did not develop from the richest source rock. The key to those accumulations is a very good series of traps which allow the oil to accumulate. I am told the best thing about those traps is the cap rock which kept the oil from traveling further upward and degrading into tars and other very thick heavy goop ... or oxidizing completely at the surface.