Here I'm simply trying to document different people's versions of some facts and some definitions. I find these things keep sliding around in a slippery fashion -- and it helps to try to settle on what comes from where.
Back to TOCVarious alternative definitions seem to be:
These are three different things. They may or not be close together.
Back to TOCVarious alternative estimates of the global Oil Peak Date seem to be:
The orthodox position is well set out in Kunstler's The Long Emergency book. He argues that "the depth between 7,500 and 15,000 feet is called the 'oil window'. Outside of this window, oil is not likely to be formed (with a corroborating reference to Kenneth Deffeys' book "Hubbert's Peak, The Impending World Oil Shortage"). Kunstler's summary of the orthodox view is that the accumulated goop of early dead plant matter was thrust down or folded by movement in the earth's crust and that eventually tectonic forces subdducted them down to a depth between 7,500 and 15,000 feet. "At depths below 15,000 feet," he argues, "pressures are so great and temperatures are so high that all the hydrocarbon molecules break down into the simplest hydrocarbon compound, methane gas , , , "which escapes through layers of rock over time."
Back to TOCLook at the website written by one Joe Vialls. There he argues that "during the forties and fifties, Russian reservoir engineers realized their reserves were being 'topped up' from below, despite a total lack of additional decaying matter. All the lay below was solid granite and basalt, meaning that the oil was actually being manufactured in the mantle of the earth, before slowly migrating between 70 and 150 miles upwards to the existing reservoir." In 1970 the Russian exploration well at Kola SG-3 went down over 40,000 feet. "since that time they have drilled more than 300 producing oil wells through solid granite and basalt, with another 20 drilled the same way in the White Tiger Field in Vietnam. By the mid-nineties Russia was so far ahead of the west, that Wall Street asset Mikhail Khodorkovsky was ordered to 'acquire' Yukos Oil Company in order to steal the technology."
Vialls continues: "The theory underlying how oil is formed at such enormous depths in the mantle of the earth is not central to this report, because the Russians have already proved its point of origin in absolute drilling terms more than 300 times. . . . What IS central to this report is the massive advantage that Russia's ultra-deep drilling discoveries and technical achievements give it over the western nations."
And here is some cloak-and-dagger stuff. Vialls writes: "If Bodra #3 had been allowed to drill ahead unhindered, there is no doubt the resulting impact would have sent shock waves around the oil world, and gained enormous international prestige for the Russians. Even more importantly perhaps, the desperately poor people of West Bengal would have gained access to their own energy reserves. Unfortunately, Bodra #3 was not allowed to drill ahead unhindered. The Americans were determined to stop the project one way or the other, and played on New Delhi's obvious fear of the Communist State Government in West Bengal. After bribing a handful of corrupt central government officials, US intelligence sent in professional American saboteurs, who managed to wreck the drilling project while the author [Vialls] was away on a visit to Sydney in Australia."
And finally, Vialls' closing argument:
"Despite the fact that American intelligence already knew of Russia's achievements with ultra deep oil production from the mantle of the earth back in the early eighties, it was obvious that this slow and expensive method of adding to national oil reserves could never keep up with America's voracious appetite for gasoline. So ultimately when domestic demand grew too fast, or cash reserves were finally depleted, America would either be obliged to halve its own use of gasoline, or steal it from someone else by force. Halving gasoline usage was out of the question, so instead of building hundreds of ultra-deep drilling rigs, Wall Street squandered the cash building more aircraft carriers, with the desperate objective of attacking and permanently occupying the Middle East.
"This is the point at which the second massive advantage derived from ultra-deep oil comes into play. Do you remember how puzzled the reservoir engineers were when they discovered that their existing reserves were being "topped up" from below? They later discovered that what they were really observing were naturally occurring ultra-deep oil wells, leaking vast quantities of oil from the mantle of the earth upwards through fractures into what we nowadays refer to as "sedimentary oilfields", located relatively close to the surface. As the production companies draw oil out of these known reservoirs through oil wells, field pressure is slightly reduced, thereby allowing more ultra-deep oil to migrate up from the mantle and restock the reservoir from below.
"Russian studies of their own ultra-deep wells and those in the White Tiger field in Vietnam, indicate in very rough terms that migration from the mantle is probably 20-30% less than production at Middle East wellheads, meaning in turn that if the flow rates of existing Iraqi and Saudi wells are reduced by about 30%, oil supply and production can and will continue forever, constantly replenished by ultra-deep oil from the mantle itself. It goes almost without saying that even with production reduced by 30%, there is more than enough oil in the Middle East to provide for America's increasing usage for at least the next century. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why your sons and daughters have died and will continue to die in Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East."
He ends with a conspiracy theory: "Predictably perhaps, I remain permanently barred by American multinationals including Yahoo and PayPal, in what appears to be an ongoing attempt to obliterate my Internet presence completely. Life is never easy for a former combat veteran living on a miniscule disability pension, but it has to be admitted that this multinational stranglehold has managed to make life even harder still."
Is there something to all this? Hey, I'm just a layman. I wish I [RJA] knew.
Back to TOCAnother website argues that Thomas Gold (of Bondi and Gold mathematical fame) was (up until his death) championing the idea "that the creatures living on or near the surface of the Earth - plants, people, possums, porpoises, pneumonia bacilli - are just part of the biological story. In the depths of the Earth's crust, he believes, is a second realm, a bacterial "deep hot biosphere" that is greater in mass than all the creatures living on land and swimming in the seas. Most biologists will tell you that life is something that happens on the Earth's surface, powered by sunlight. Gold counters that most living beings reside deep in the Earth's crust at temperatures well above 100 degrees Celsius, living off methane and other hydrocarbons. . . . Presented in full in his 1999 book, 'The Deep Hot Biosphere', Gold's theory of life below the Earth's surface is an outgrowth of his heretical theories about the origins of oil, coal, and natural gas. In the traditional view, of course, these substances are the residues of dead creatures. When organic matter from swamps and seafloors gets buried deep enough in the crust, it goes through chemical changes that distill it into hydrocarbons we can then dig up and burn. Gold believes none of this. He's convinced that the hydrocarbons we use come from chemical stocks that were incorporated into the Earth at its creation."
"Gold still argues passionately for his "abiogenic" (not biological in origin) theory of oil. In the 1980s he persuaded researchers in Sweden to drill a hole some 6 kilometers deep into solid granite - a rock that crystallizes out of molten lava deep within the Earth, and thus should not contain any organic remains - and succeeded in finding some oil. This didn't convince the geology community, which felt that the oil must have gotten into the granite through cracks. But Gold took it as a vindication."
Thomas Gold died at age 84 in 2004 in Ithaca, New York (Cornell headquarters) -- so we can't argue with him now. A Cornell website reports that "The debate still is raging on one of Gold's last, and most widely controversial, ideas: that oil and natural gas are formed not from decaying organic matter, as most scientists believe, but from geologic processes and continually well up to the surface from deep underground." He WAS wrong on some things (like the Steady State theory of the universe he developed with Fred Hoyle -- and which I was fascinated by in the 1950s -- but which was ultimately disproved (in favour of the Big Bang theory) by the discovery of the 3 degree background radiation from the Big Bang. That, of course, doesn't prove he's wrong on his deep abiogenic oil theory.
An interview with Bond (before his death) about his book The Deep Hot Biosphere: The Myth of Fossil Fuels can be found at this website.
Back to TOCAnother website points out that Chevron Texaco drilled a well located in 7,000 feet of water and drilled it to a depth of 29,000 feet at the Jack Prospect located in the Gulf of Mexico -- see their Sep/04 announcement
Does this mean that Chevron Texaco now believes in DEEP OIL too? The 2004 Annual Report of ChevronTexaco says that they've completed the Tahiti Field in the Gulf of Mexico drilling in 4,100 feet of water to a depth of 25,800 feet subsea -- "the deepest yet in the gulf".
Back to TOCIn a recent article, Goodstein says: "I'm sometimes asked, what about replenishing our oil reserves through deep-ocean exploration? I'm already factoring in close-to-shore oil production, but the deep oceans are essentially unexplored and, it's true, we don't know whether there's any oil out there. Over the last hundreds of millions of years, oil typically has been manufactured in places that are rich in life, which deep oceans are not. But the landmasses have moved around over geologic time, so there may be deep-ocean oil reserves.
Back to TOCThis article in the Geotimes (thanks to Rob Burton for the reference) refers to one "J.F. Kenney, a self-proclaimed oil and gas driller from Houston who worked with three Russian scientists" who all believed in abiogenic oil. But this article seems to dismiss their theories. It quotes "geochemist Alexei Milkov of the Deep Ocean Exploration Institute at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and a graduate of Saint-Petersburg State University in Russia, 'I've never met an industry geologist that uses abiogenic theory to find oil and gas fields, and that includes Russian industry geologists.'" [RJA comment: all of which seems in direct contradiction to Joe Vialls discussion (above) of working with the Russians]
Back to TOCThis is not worth spending much time on. We're quickly running out.
Back to TOCIn a recent article, David Goodstein says: "Methane hydrate is a solid that looks like ice, but that burns if you ignite it. It consists of methane trapped in a sort of cage of water molecules and it gets created when methane comes into contact with water under very high pressure at very low temperatures close to the freezing point of water. Nobody has any idea of where all it is, how much there is, whether it can be mined, or how it could be used -- all we know is that this stuff exists.
Back to TOCKunstler dismisses coal quickly as being dirty and unacceptable.
But others argue that clean coal technology solves these problems (except, of course, for CO2 emissions) and that there's 300 years supply of the stuff.
In a recent article, David Goodstein says: "We are told that there is enough coal in the ground for hundreds, maybe even thousands of years, at the present rate of use. The fact that these estimates range over a factor of ten tells you immediately that nobody has the foggiest notion of how much coal is actually available."
"Coal can be liquefied and made into a substitute for oil. That was done in Nazi Germany during World War II, and in South Africa under apartheid. . . . But, coal is a dirty, dirty fuel. It often comes with nasty impurities, including mercury, arsenic, and sulfur. The mercury that accumulates in the bodies of tuna or swordfish -- and which has led to FDA warnings to limit our consumption of these fish -- originates in coal-fired power plants in the United States. We use now about twice as much energy from oil as we do from coal, so if you wanted to mine enough coal to replace the missing oil, you'd have to mine it at a much higher rate, not only to replace the oil, but also because the conversion process to oil is extremely inefficient. You'd have to mine it at levels at least five times beyond those we mine now-a coal-mining industry on an absolutely unimaginable scale."
Back to TOCIn a recent article, David Goodstein says: if we "just let the marketplace do its thing as we make use of all the fossil fuel we can, we'll start running out of all fossil fuels by the end of this century.
Back to TOCIn a recent article, David Goodstein says: "To produce enough nuclear power to equal the power we currently get from fossil fuels, you would have to build 10,000 of the largest possible nuclear power plants. That's a huge, probably nonviable initiative, and at that burn rate, our known reserves of uranium would last only for 10 or 20 years." [RJA comment: I'd really like to see the arithmetic for this]
Back to TOCThis is surely the right long-term solution. The whole universe runs on fusion power, so why can't humankind figure it out. We probably will -- but not in time to save us from the chaos following the end of oil.
Back to TOCThe ITER project (based on magnetic confinement) was predicting a commercializable design only by about 2050.
David Goodstein comments that "attaining this objective is far off". In a recent article, he says: "What we really need is leadership with the courage and vision to talk to us as John F. Kennedy did in 1960, when he pledged to put a man on the moon by the end of the decade. It's the same kind of problem. We understand the basic underlying scientific principles, but we have huge technical problems to overcome. If our leaders were to say to the scientific and technical community, 'We will give you the resources, and you-right now, even before it becomes imperative-will find a way to kick the fossil-fuel habit,' I think that it could be done. But we have to have the political leadership to make it work."
Back to TOCA physicsweb webpage discussed the laser fusion possibilities. (Thanks to Rob Burton for this reference). This is an alternative to the ITER project's planned "magnetic confinement" -- using, instead, laser or ion beams for "inertial confinement" -- but the issue remains how soon? -- they talk about starting construction about the end of the decade -- but does this mean final commercializable design or initial prototype research? -- ITER talked about commercialization by 2050 (which is too late for the oil crisis) -- will the new "HiPER" commercialization be faster? -- the article really doesn't say (but I guess there's some hope)
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