World's largest oil field in...N. and S. Dakota and Montana

[Alex Linder]

Can anyone give a useful analysis of the (Russian?) abiotic theory?

[Alex Linder]

You know, you actually are allowed to post on here without insulting other people. It's not a rule that there be a 1:1 ratio. Sometimes you can just discuss and leave the personalities out.

One actual use of a forum is pooling knowlege, if not wisdom. I have read an article or two about abiotic oil theory, but not enough to judge it either way. It would actually be useful, ie extend my knowledge, if someone with brains, someone who knows something about oil, could explain the competing theories and then judge them.

[Rikert]

There is of course, the possibility that liquid hydrocarbons are biotic in origin, but are not a limited fossilized remnant of ancient biological material. It could be a metabolic byproduct of some exotic deep earth microorganism. There are organisms which thrive under extreme conditions near deep water ocean and hot springs. There are known organisms that have hydrocarbon metabolic byproducts (methanogens).

[Trevor Dermott]

I've looked into this in the past. From what I can determine, the abiotic theory is still questionable, but it's entirely possible. That is to say, experiments have been done that show under high pressure and temperatures, oil will form from the elemental constituents. I do recall that analysis with thermodynamic theory shows that the biological decay theory doesn't hold.

Here's a paper linked from the wiki article:
http://www.pnas.org/content/99/17/10976.full

Interpretation of the significance of the relative differences between the chemical potentials of the hydrocarbon system and those of biological molecules, applying the dictates of thermodynamic-stability theory, disposes of any hypothesis of an origin for hydrocarbon molecules from biological matter, excepting only the lightest, methane. [emphasis mine]

[Dan Allan]

Is there an oil field anywhere in the world that has never peaked in production?

[psychologicalshock]

Originally Posted by Alex Linder

Can anyone give a useful analysis of the (Russian?) abiotic theory?

Actually the theory currently favored in the West (Decay of biological matter) also originated in Russia in the late Renaissance period.

If you're interested in the subject I suggest this read:

http://www.gasresources.net/DisposalBioClaims.htm

and the site in general.

[Mike in Denver]

Originally Posted by Dan Allan

Is there an oil field anywhere in the world that has never peaked in production?

Obviously, yes. Every year new oil fields are discovered. Large oil fields have been discovered this year and last year in Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Brazil, and lots of other places.. Certainly, these fields have not peaked.

I'm guessing what you meant to ask was, "Are there any oil fields that have been in production for a very long time that have not peaked?"

Yes, Florence, Colorado.

"Since that time [1876] the Florence Oil field has produced over thirteen million barrels of oil, and in the last year a new oil-bearing territory has been opened up, adding from eighty to one hundred square miles of potential riches to the community. There are more wells going down in the Florence field at the present time than has been the case for years, there now being fifteen or twenty in progress..." Just one example.

Mike

[Dan Allan]

Originally Posted by Mike in Denver

Obviously, yes. Every year new oil fields are discovered. Large oil fields have been discovered this year and last year in Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Brazil, and lots of other places.. Certainly, these fields have not peaked.

I'm guessing what you meant to ask was, "Are there any oil fields that have been in production for a very long time that have not peaked?"

Yes, Florence, Colorado.

"Since that time [1876] the Florence Oil field has produced over thirteen million barrels of oil, and in the last year a new oil-bearing territory has been opened up, adding from eighty to one hundred square miles of potential riches to the community. There are more wells going down in the Florence field at the present time than has been the case for years, there now being fifteen or twenty in progress..." Just one example.

Mike

But was it proven that it lasted so long because of abiotic oil production, or was it just because they expanded the area being drilled? Just curious, really I don't know much about this.

[psychologicalshock]

Originally Posted by Dan Allan

But was it proven that it lasted so long because of abiotic oil production, or was it just because they expanded the area being drilled? Just curious, really I don't know much about this.

Abiotic production isn't expected to refill oil fields within a short period of time, I don't know where people get that. The main application for the theory is finding new oil not predicting if present reservoirs will refill, because they wont.

[Mike in Denver]

Originally Posted by Dan Allan

But was it proven that it lasted so long because of abiotic oil production, or was it just because they expanded the area being drilled? Just curious, really I don't know much about this.

You make a good point here. It does look like in the case of Florence, they expanded the area. I don't know if any particular well has been producing since 1876.

For the larger question...biotic vs. abiotic...I'm agnostic. I really don't know how to resolve it, even to satisfy my curiosity. In a purely practical sense, I guess it doesn't matter. It's fairly convincing that we aren't going to run out of oil for a very long time.

I'm sure there is biotic oil, though I don't know if all oil is biotic. The arguments for abiotic are interesting, if not quite convincing. There is certainly a lot of biotic methane. I'm going out for a few beers later, and I plan to produce some, myself. There are large amounts of methane in carbon deposits in the mantle of the earth. Is it biotic or abiotic? Standard science says biotic. Sometimes standard science is wrong, stubbornly wrong.

There is a lot of abiotic methane off earth. An example is Saturn's moon Titan, which is covered with methane. The gas giants have methane in their atmospheres. All this is abiotic, and no one argues that. Even Mars has methane, though some think it may be biotic. This doesn't prove that the methane in earth's mantle is abiotic.

How about more complicated hydrocarbons, say the oil we get out of wells? If methane is abiotic (for argument's sake) could it become petroleum without biotic processes? It can be done in the laboratory, and using only heat and pressure. Use electricity and you can get there even easier. But, this only proves that mechanisms exist to do it. The question of biotic vs. abiotic on the giant scale of earth is still to be proved, though both sides claim it has been proved.

Mike

[Hugo Böse]

Originally Posted by Mike in Denver

Sorry, it's not shale oil. It's fairly shallow, easy to drill oil, and there are thousands of years of it. The area is composed of shale formations, but the oil is easy to extract liquid oil.

Apparently it’s not that easy, or they would be producing much more than they are. According to this article , horizontal drilling is expensive and complicated. The oil in the shale may be liquid but it’s much more difficult and expensive to extract because shale is not as porous as sandstone, meaning that oil does not seep as easily through the rock to the pump. In shale the rock needs to be somehow cracked in order for the oil to seep into an area where it can be pumped up. link

[Hugo Böse]

Originally Posted by psychologicalshock

Abiotic production isn't expected to refill oil fields within a short period of time, I don't know where people get that. The main application for the theory is finding new oil not predicting if present reservoirs will refill, because they wont.

In Louisiana there have been cases were oil wells have recovered.

[Bud White]

Originally Posted by Oy Ze Hate

World's Biggest Oil Reserves
In S Dakota, E Montana
Author Unknown
7-7-9

The U.S. Geological Service issued a report in April ('08) that only scientists and oil men knew was coming, but man was it big. It was a revised report (hadn't been updated since '95) on how much oil was in this area of the western 2/3 of North Dakota; western South Dakota; and extreme eastern Montana ..... check THIS out:

The Bake is the largest domestic oil discovery since Alaska 's Purdah Bay, and has the potential to eliminate all American dependence on foreign oil. The Energy Information Administration (EIA) estimates it at 503 billion barrels.. Even if just 10% of the oil is recoverable... at $107 a barrel, we're looking at a resource base worth more than $5.3 trillion.

'When I first briefed legislators on this, you could practically see their jaws hit the floor. They had no idea..' says Terry Johnson, the Montana Legislature's financial analyst.

'This sizable find is now the highest-producing onshore oil field found in the past 56 years.' reports, The Pittsburgh Post Gazette. It's a formation known as the Williston Basin, but is more commonly referred to as the 'Bake.' And it stretches from Northern Montana, through North Dakota and into Canada . For years, U.S. oil exploration has been considered a dead end. Even the 'Big Oil' companies gave up searching for major oil wells decades ago. However, a recent technological breakthrough has opened up the Bakken's massive reserves.... and we now have access of up to 500 billion barrels. And because this is light, sweet oil, those billions of barrels will cost Americans just $16 PER BARREL!

1. That's enough crude to fully fuel the American economy for 2041 years straight.

2. And if THAT didn't throw you on the floor, then this next one should - because it's from TWO YEARS AGO!

U. S. Oil Discovery- Largest Reserve in the World! Stansberry Report Online - 4/20/2006

Hidden 1,000 feet beneath the surface of the Rocky Mountains lies the largest untapped oil reserve in the world. It is more than 2 TRILLION barrels. On August 8, 2005 President Bush mandated its extraction. In three and a half years of high oil prices none has been extracted. With this motherload of oil why are we still fighting over off-shore drilling?

They reported this stunning news: We have more oil inside our borders, than all the other proven reserves on earth.

Here are the official estimates:

- 8-times as much oil as Saudi Arabia

- 18-times as much oil as Iraq

- 21-times as much oil as Kuwait

- 22-times as much oil as Iran

- 500-times as much oil as Yemen

- and it's all right here in the Western United States.

HOW can this BE? HOW can we NOT BE extracting this? Because the environmentalists and others have blocked all efforts to help America become independent of foreign oil! Again, we are letting a small group of people dictate our lives and our economy.....WHY?

James Bartis, lead researcher with the study says we've got more oil in this very compact area than the entire Middle East - more than 2 TRILLION barrels untapped. That's more than all the proven oil reserves of crude oil in the world today, reports The Denver Post.

Don't think 'OPEC' will drop its price - even with this find? Think again! It's all about the competitive marketplace - it has to.. Think OPEC just might be funding the environmentalists?

Got your attention/ire up yet? Hope so!

Now, while you're thinking about it .... and hopefully P.O'd, do this:

3. Pass this along. If you don't take a little time to do this, then you should stifle yourself the next time you want to complain about gas prices .. because by doing NOTHING, you've forfeited your right to complain.

Now, I just wonder what would happen in this country if every one of you sent this to every one in your address book.

This is all true. Check it out at the link below. GOOGLE it or follow this link. It will blow your mind.

http://www.usgs.gov/newsroom/article.asp?ID=1911

Old news man, this story has been around for awhile. Now, smart people like myself and Ted Turner have been buying up property in North Dakota for awhile.

When I was out there checking on my property in October I was talking to some lines men for the phone company. He's been quiet about it, but Ted Turner has been buying of thousands of acres of property up there. This story made Fox News last summer, there are reports that there's a new millionaire made out there every day.

[psychologicalshock]

Originally Posted by Hugo Böse

In Louisiana there have been cases were oil wells that have recovered.

There are always exceptions but in general that isn't what is meant by that theory.

[Oy Ze Hate]

@ Bud White

Just as one man's trash is another man's treasure, so is one man's non-story another man's news.

And that's smart of you to be buying up land there. Maybe we can someday all build a big fancy WN compound on your land when you're a millionaire?

Isn't it funny how Britney Spears having her snatch accidentally photographed is front page stuff while major oil field discoveries which could (supposedly) have America totally independent of foreign oil for over two thousand years is a back page mention?

Seas of oil under our feet, it's amazing.

And yes, as others have mentioned, the oil market is completely manipulated by greedy bastards.

Doesn't it stand to reason that if we have synthetic oil then oil can be synthesized. Ie, crude oil COULD be abiotic. Of course I don't really know enough about it to know much about it.

[IZAN]

Why use the our oil when we can use other peoples first?

[Myron]

[QUOTE=psychologicalshock;1024054]

You could have at least looked up the article on wikipedia to ascertain that fact . How exactly would carbon come from liquid metal? Not everyone is as dumb as you Steve.

[QUOTE]

when you boil water, the CARBON dioxide gas is bubbling up, same thing happens when the earth's mantle and core, the earth's crust is all the slag that rises to the top, because it's lighter than Iron and nickel and the stuff at the core. Pockets of gasses get trapped and compressed and that's what makes oil.

[Ex-Detroiter]

As far as I now know, nothing came of this drill effort for abiotic oil. They spent a lot of time and money trying to find it though.


________________________
04/16/1999
The Wall Street Journal
Page A1
(Copyright (c) 1999, Dow Jones & Company, Inc.)

HOUSTON -- Something mysterious is going on at Eugene Island 330.

Production at the oil field, deep in the Gulf of Mexico off the coast of Louisiana, was supposed to have declined years ago. And for a while, it behaved like any normal field: Following its 1973 discovery, Eugene Island 330's output peaked at about 15,000 barrels a day. By 1989, production had slowed to about 4,000 barrels a day.

Then suddenly -- some say almost inexplicably -- Eugene Island's fortunes reversed. The field, operated by PennzEnergy Co., is now producing 13,000 barrels a day, and probable reserves have rocketed to more than 400 million barrels from 60 million. Stranger still, scientists studying the field say the crude coming out of the pipe is of a geological age quite different from the oil that gushed 10 years ago.

All of which has led some scientists to a radical theory: Eugene Island is rapidly refilling itself, perhaps from some continuous source miles below the Earth's surface. That, they say, raises the tantalizing possibility that oil may not be the limited resource it is assumed to be.
"It kind of blew me away," says Jean Whelan, a geochemist and senior researcher from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts. Connected to Woods Hole since 1973, Dr. Whelan says she considered herself a traditional thinker until she encountered the phenomenon in the Gulf of Mexico. Now, she says, "I believe there is a huge system of oil just migrating" deep underground.
Conventional wisdom says the world's supply of oil is finite, and that it was deposited in horizontal reservoirs near the surface in a process that took millions of years. Since the economies of entire countries ride on the fundamental notion that oil reserves are exhaustible, any contrary evidence "would change the way people see the game, turn the world view upside down," says Daniel Yergin, a petroleum futurist and industry consultant in Cambridge, Mass. "Oil and renewable resource are not words that often appear in the same sentence."

Doomsayers to the contrary, the world contains far more recoverable oil than was believed even 20 years ago. Between 1976 and 1996, estimated global oil reserves grew 72%, to 1.04 trillion barrels. Much of that growth came in the past 10 years, with the introduction of computers to the oil patch, which made drilling for oil more predictable.

Still, most geologists are hard-pressed to explain why the world's greatest oil pool, the Middle East, has more than doubled its reserves in the past 20 years, despite half a century of intense exploitation and relatively few new discoveries. It would take a pretty big pile of dead dinosaurs and prehistoric plants to account for the estimated 660 billion barrels of oil in the region, notes Norman Hyne, a professor at the University of Tulsa in Oklahoma. "Off-the-wall theories often turn out to be right," he says.

Even some of the most staid U.S. oil companies find the Eugene Island discoveries intriguing. "These reservoirs are refilling with oil," acknowledges David Sibley, a Chevron Corp. geologist who has monitored the work at Eugene Island. Mr. Sibley cautions, however, that much research remains to be done on the source of that oil. "At this point, it's not black and white. It's gray," he says.

Although the world has been drilling for oil for generations, little is known about the nature of the resource or the underground activities that led to its creation. And because even conservative estimates say known oil reserves will last 40 years or more, most big oil companies haven't concerned themselves much with hunting for deep sources like the reservoirs scientists believe may exist under Eugene Island.

Economics never hindered the theorists, however. One, Thomas Gold, a respected astronomer and professor emeritus at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., has held for years that oil is actually a renewable, primordial syrup continually manufactured by the Earth under ultrahot conditions and tremendous pressures. As this substance migrates toward the surface, it is attacked by bacteria, making it appear to have an organic origin dating back to the dinosaurs, he says.

While many scientists discount Prof. Gold's theory as unproved, "it made a believer out of me," says Robert Hefner, chairman of Seven Seas Petroleum Inc., a Houston firm that specializes in ultradeep drilling and has worked with the professor on his experiments. Seven Seas continues to use "conventional" methods in seeking reserves, though the halls of the company often ring with dissent. "My boss and I yell at each other all the time about these theories," says Russ Cunningham, a geologist and exploration manager for Seven Seas who isn't sold on Prof. Gold's ideas.

Knowing that clever theories don't fill the gas tank, Roger Anderson, an oceanographer and executive director of Columbia University's Energy Research Center in New York, proposed studying the behavior of oil in a reservoir in hopes of finding a new way to help companies vacuum up what their drilling was leaving behind.

He focused on Eugene Island, a kidney-shaped subsurface mountain that slopes steeply into the Gulf depths. About 80 miles off the Louisiana coast, the underwater landscape surrounding Eugene Island is otherworldly, cut with deep fissures and faults that spontaneously belch gas and oil. In 1985, as he stood on the deck of a shrimp boat towing an oil-sniffing contraption through the area, Dr. Anderson pondered Eugene Island's strange history. "Migrating oil and anomalous production. I sort of linked the two ideas together," he says.

Five years later, the U.S. Department of Energy ponied up $10 million to investigate the Eugene Island geologic formation, and especially the oddly behaving field at its crest. A consortium of companies leasing chunks of the formation, including such giants as Chevron, Exxon Corp. and Texaco Corp., matched the federal grant.

The Eugene Island researchers began their investigation about the same time that 3-D seismic technology was introduced to the oil business, allowing geologists to see promising reservoirs as a cavern in the ground rather than as a line on a piece of paper.

Taking the technology one step further, Dr. Anderson used a powerful computer to stack 3-D images of Eugene Island on top of one another. That resulted in a 4-D image, showing not only the reservoir in three spatial dimensions, but showing also the movement of its contents over time as PennzEnergy siphoned out oil.
What Dr. Anderson noticed as he played his time-lapse model was how much oil PennzEnergy had missed over the years. The remaining crude, surrounded by water and wobbling like giant globs of Jell-O in the computer model, gave PennzEnergy new targets as it reworked Eugene Island.
What captivated scientists, though, was a deep fault in the bottom corner of the computer scan that was gushing oil like a garden hose. "We could see the stream," Dr. Anderson says. "It wasn't even debated that it was happening."

Woods Hole's Dr. Whelan, invited by Dr. Anderson to join the Eugene Island investigation, postulated that superheated methane gas -- a compound that is able to absorb vast amounts of oil -- was carrying crude from a deep source below. The age of the crude pushed through the stream, and its hotter temperature helped support that theory. The scientists decided to drill into the fault.
As prospectors, the scientists were fairly lucky. As researchers they weren't. The first well they drilled hit natural gas, a pocket so pressurized "that it scared us," Dr. Anderson says; that well is still producing. The second stab, however, collapsed the fault. "Some oil flowed. I have 15 gallons of it in my closet," Dr. Anderson says. But it wasn't successful enough to advance Dr. Whelan's theory.

A third well was drilled at a spot on an adjacent lease, where the fault disappeared from seismic view. The researchers missed the stream but hit a fair-size reservoir, one that is still producing.
It was here, in 1995, that the scientists ran out of grant money and PennzEnergy lost interest in continuing. "I'm not discounting the possibility that there is oil moving into these reservoirs," says William Van Wie, a PennzEnergy senior vice president. "I question only the rate."

Dr. Whelan hasn't lost interest, however, and is seeking to investigate further the mysterious vents and seeps. While industry geologists have generally assumed such eruptions are merely cracks in a shallow oil reservoir, they aren't sure. Noting that many of the seeps are occurring in deep water, rather than in the relative shallows of the continental shelf, Dr. Whelan wonders if they may link a deeper source.

This summer, a tiny submarine chartered by a Louisiana State University researcher will attempt to install a series of measuring devices on vents near the Eugene Island property. Dr. Whelan hopes this will give her some idea of how quickly Eugene Island is refilling. "We need to know if we're talking years or if we're talking hundreds of thousands of years," she says.

[Myron]

I have just had a thought, my own theory. Oil produced from compressed methane near the surface, drains down , down, down deep through fissures in the rock and faults, etc, because of gravity. Logically, the oil is liquid so it would, over millions of years, all drain down to the lowest level it can, so it would be found lower than organic matter.

[Fissile]

Originally Posted by Steve B

The Russians have a theory that oil is self replenishing. That it comes from the earths molten core and it will never run out.

I don't know about you, but in my house, we obey the laws of thermodynamics.