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July 8th, 2009 | #22 |
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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. |
July 8th, 2009 | #23 |
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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).
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July 8th, 2009 | #24 | |
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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 Quote:
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July 8th, 2009 | #25 |
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Is there an oil field anywhere in the world that has never peaked in production?
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July 8th, 2009 | #26 | |
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If you're interested in the subject I suggest this read: http://www.gasresources.net/DisposalBioClaims.htm and the site in general. |
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July 8th, 2009 | #27 | |
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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
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July 8th, 2009 | #28 | |
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July 8th, 2009 | #29 |
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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.
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July 8th, 2009 | #30 | |
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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
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Hunter S. Thompson, "Big dark, coming soon" Last edited by Mike in Denver; July 8th, 2009 at 06:18 PM. |
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July 8th, 2009 | #31 | |
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July 8th, 2009 | #32 |
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In Louisiana there have been cases were oil wells have recovered.
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_______ Political correctness is an intellectual gulag. Last edited by Hugo Böse; July 9th, 2009 at 07:00 AM. Reason: Oopz |
July 8th, 2009 | #33 | |
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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.
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July 8th, 2009 | #34 |
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July 8th, 2009 | #35 |
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@ 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. |
July 9th, 2009 | #36 |
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Why use the our oil when we can use other peoples first?
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July 10th, 2009 | #37 |
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[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. |
July 10th, 2009 | #38 |
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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. |
July 10th, 2009 | #39 |
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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.
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July 10th, 2009 | #40 |
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