[ARCHIVED THREAD] - Calling all Geologists! (Page 1 of 2)
Posted: 3/15/2005 10:38:16 AM EDT
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Well, THIS certainly puts a new spin on things..... Link: What if fossil fuels aren't fossils and are actually renewable?
Anyone have a decent scientific take on this? Sounds plausible, but there is so much junk science that does, too. Any geologists in the house? Edited to help readability. |
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I was a geology major for a couple of years while I was in college. Not that that really makes me qualified to answer the question, but based on what I learned this is my take: The way I look at it is that a lot of people (geologists in particular) will probably scoff at this. Personally, I think that there is the possibility that he is right. I'm not saying for sure, but just that there is the possiblity. If there is one thing about geology that really struck me while I was in the major, it was that A LOT of it is based on assumption and guesswork. Many times it's educated guesses and assumptions, but guesses and assumptions none the less. I would be interested to see if anyone knew of a scientific study where they took plants and dead animals, tried to make them decay in a controlled environment, accelerated the process to try and produce oil. I don't think they've been able to do that, or there would probably be people using dead plants and animals to produce oil in labs instead of drilling for it all over the world. Then again, I hear that some people can make bio-diesel out of corn. 
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What gets me is the whole "Why is there methane on planets with no life?" argument. Either the argument is valid, or there are things to discover in the universe that will simply stun the imagination. I'm thinking the truth is somewhere in between on this one.... |
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I'm a chemical engineer...well, at least that's what I majored in years ago. I would disagree with the premise this fellow is proferring. Oil does indeed come from decomposed matter that, under temperature, pressure, and a loonngg cooking time will produce oil. What I question is that he's discussing oil resources as if they are still being made. There were a finite number of organic organisms, to include plant and animal life from which we have tapped for the last century or so. These are not renewable resources; in fact, some pockets of oil have not been subjected to the conditions (temperature and pressure) to be of much value. Now, from a personal point of view, I would like oil to...be consumed. Yup, and massively. When the price of oil becomes more expensive than a new technology to replace it, we will no longer be threatend by over-seas oil-producing nations that are typically good for only one thing; they have oil reserves. Oh, and so do we. Blessed as we are by proven oil and natural gas, as well as shale, we would not soon find the current environmental constraints that un-appetizing. Though this nations demands would soon tax even these resources. Better for a new technology to become affordable. |
Not to be argumentative, but the "face of everything that has ever been learned" is a poor standard. I'll remind you that Relativity did the same thing at the time.... |
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Oil and gas would just dissipate, spread out, if not for a mechanism that would collect it. Think of it as the reverse of puddles catching and holding water from rainfall. Oil and gas rise and move through sandstone and other porous formations and pool under rises (domes) or faults where there are non-porous formations above them that trap the oil and gas. Gas will be found on top of the producing zone, just below the nonporous formations, then oil below the gas, and below that, brine water (concentrated salt water). There is oil in some shales, but it is spread out, the oil cannot flow and pool. The shale must be mined and crushed, and then the oil extracted. This makes it impractical. |
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Gold is full-0-crap. Everyone knows: First the earth cooled. And, then the dinosaurs came, but they got too big and fat, so they all died, and they turned into oil. And, then the Arabs came and they bought Mercedes Benzes. And, Prince Charles started wearing all of Lady Di's clothes. I couldn't believe it, he took her best summer dress out of the closet, and put it on, and went to town. |
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1. There would be evidence of the microbes in the oil if it were true. We would have discovered it a long time ago. It makes good science fiction though. 2. They make oil from plants now by heating under intences pressure. Go to your local super market and pic up a bottle of "VEGITALBLE OIL". Since this is how we make oil and we know that the conditions are the same in the earth we assume this is the method that it is done. That aside there has been some signs that oil forms naturaly much faster than originaly thought. Say all the oil we know of now formed in the space of 5-6 hundred years as opposed to the millions of years previously thought. In fact new oil is forming even now. We are depleting the oil fast and it would still take a long time for the same amount to form again. |
we can make oil in chemcial plants now.... couple bucks a barrel once the scale is large enough |
There ARE microbes in petroleum. Oil in plants is NATURAL and quite different from petroleum. Edible oils are actually triglycerides, trpile esters of glycerol and long chain carboxylate acids. And if anyone doubts it, there is twice as much carbon in seafloor methane as is in all other fossil fuels COMBINED. This methane exists as a ice known as a clatherate. Pressure from the deep seawater prevents this ice from melting at elevated temperatures but once buried under a few feet of sediment, it then melts and rises to the seafloor where it reforms as clatherate. We need not worry about energy because this clatherate forms rapidly and is a viable source of methane. We don't yet have the technology but are working on it. |
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I thank God that i'm not a soft rock geo. That being said I work at a gold mine that is hosted in a muddy limestone, that was once an oil/organic matter host that has been cooked off by an hydrothermal event, hence the gold. According to the traditional model of oil generation, you need an anaerobic (no oxygen) depositional system. That means that you need a somewhat stagnant depositional environment where bacteria cannot consume the energy locked in organisms that die and float to the bottom of the sea or lake floor. These dead critters are further buried over millions of years and are subjected to elevated pressures and temperatures typically found at depth (thousands of feet). The keroten (can't remember what the "energy" in the dead critters is called) is cooked and turns into oil. A by product of the oil generation is methane and other gases collectively called natural gas. Cook the bugs too much and you get CO2. So, now you've made some oil, but it's generally in a poor host rock to be able to suck it out of the ground in an efficient manner. But the oil can migrate SLOWLY and if it can get into a porous unit, like a sandstone, that is capped by an impervious unit, like a shale or limestone, you'll have an oil deposit. A cool deposit that existed a few millions of years ago was the San Rafeal Swell in east central Utah. Erosion has exposed the oil, which went down the Colorado River over the past millions of years. But on the margins of the swell, you can find the oil generating limestone that still smells like oil when you break it open (geos love breaking rocks). Anyways, the earth does give off gases, just like volcanos and hot springs are spewing out every day. The methane content is very low but you could have a lot of time. You don't find oil by volcanos, so that source is out the door. Where do you find oil? In sedimentary rocks, in areas where you see(or once existed) subsidence and continous deposition. these areas almost always have very low heat flows, which to me indicates you aren't getting much influence from anything below the crust. I don't think you could get enough methane from any non-depositionaly related source to create oil. Oil does move around and it shouldn't surprise anyone that a once pumped dry well, could be rejuvenated by migrating oil. you just have to realize that it might take a very long time to rejuvenate, that shit has been buried for a VERY LONG TIME. Of course, when you pump something out the pressure fields could change dramaticallyand you could refill something pretty quick. I'm a geo and I'm the first to admit that there's a lot we don't understand about earth processes. I also know that there are a lot of geos who have some really crazy ideas that aren't based in upon "sound" science. I do think there is a shit load of oil out there to be had, but I don't think it's being made today at a scale that would of any value. PS I've had a few whiskeys and don't feel like proof reading this right now. |
I may be mistaken, but MY understanding is that this is beacause of new technology? We can drill for it better or somesuch. (I VAGUELY recall something to this effect, anyway). But since we have some REAL geologists here, this flitted into and OUT OF my head a couple weeks ago... could the REASON (or part of it, anyway) that the center of the earth is killer hot is that the "oil" from hundreds and thousands (millions? Billions?) of years past is "fueling" it? And by our USING a big chunk of the oil reserves think we might be really messing something up? (Granted REALLY FAR into the future....) I mostly let it go because to have "fire" one needs oxygen too... and I am SO not a scientist, though I CAN think in that mode, I just wasn't interested enough to persue the "thread" my brain created. Thoughts? It's SORTA "related" ;) |
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GaryM the Veggies turn into coal, soylent green is made from critters (plankton), I mean oil not soylent green. Kacer, the center of the earth so so burnin' hot from all of that radioactive decay going on. All of the heavier elements sank to the center of the earth as earth was forming or aggregating. Heat was generated as elements moved as the heavier stuff sank and the lighter stuff floated to the surface. The "heat" has been continuously generated by the decay of uranium and other unstable isotopes. After a while all of the unsatble isotopes will decay and the earth's core will cool, vulcanism will cease. Oil doesn't have anything to do with it. edited for shitty spelling |
I stayed at a holiday inn, so i'm more than qualified. hey chemical engineer guys/gals. I remember reading about that Coal can be turned into crude oil, doesn't the USofA have the largest deposits of coal in the world with the price oil being at $54 a barrel the economy of scale should allow for the switching to coal base oil |
Sure you're not thinking Shale Oil? ETA: or Oil Shale, or whatever they call it.... |
WWII that how nazis kept going i think???? |
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Peak Oil believes all that Paul Ehrlich BS, gloom and doom. Well, we have good reserves and they are increasing. New discoveries are being made all the time. You know what the big problem is??? Environmental laws that prevent many areas from being explored, places we KNOW there is oil. Also, we haven't built a new refinery in many, many years. That is the problem. But guys like Peak will sip on Evian water while griping about the cost of gas. They'll gladly pay an outrageous price for bottled water, but grip about the price of oil. |
The heat at the center is partly a cuase of and an effect of our magnetic field. The liquid moves causeing a magnectic field. The magnetic field causes the fluid to move. but another reason the fluid moves is the center is not circular. The center of the earth has 2 lobes and as the earth spins the solid center moves in the fluid at a different speed as compared to the crust. Now this is only been evidenced by one thing. When we went to the moon we looked back with thermal imagers. And saw the 2 lobed center. |
Got any data to back up your assertion that: 1. New discoveries are being made all the time 2. Environmental laws prevent many areas from being explored I was considering posting a huge list of articles related to oil exploration and depletion issues, but I'm going to skip it. There are so many resources out there for your use that I don't see the need to duplicate all their efforts. Try these www.peakoil.org www.peakoil.net (excellent data available here) www.wikipedia.org, search on "energy crisis" and "Hubbert's peak" www.energybulletin.net There has been so much news about this topic lately. I can't even begin to list all of it. A member of the House of Representatives made a one-hour presentation to the House yesterday on this topic, and kicked off his presentation by quoting Matt Savinar's website www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net. Or, maybe all the wells are filling back up and I'm a moron for believing the petroleum geologists who have been forecasting this for fifty years and got it more or less right. HR's getting ready to pass a fuel surcharge and use the bling to fund some kind of workable transportation alternatives. BTW, I'm not bitching about the price of gas. I switched to a motorcycle for my transportation, and I'm getting ready to move to a place that gets its power from a local and renewable resource. I'm trying to help you. I'd hope you would do the same for me. Look around you, bro. |
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according to National Goegraphic Pig Manure Converted to Crude Oil |
Turkey guts to oil Waste-to-Oil Company Selling Oil Commercially 5.19.2004 process turns any organic based item into oil... Once started will run off the energy it produces... current test plant uses turkey byproducts.. seem to be able to use any kind of organic material.. |
cool |
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Orion, Your links don't support what you posted earlier.
You don't make vegetable oil with thermal depolymerization. You don't make 2 trillion barrels of oil in 5-600 years with thermal depolymerization. Got any links to back up this stuff? Oh, and how many barrels of crude are currently supplied by TDP to the market? And what exactly would it take to replace 10% of the world's current appetite for oil? I'm not saying we shouldn't pursue TDP right now, and ramp up ASAP, but you need to understand the enormous disconnect between what's really there and what you may wish to believe is there. |
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Research from the 1950's to till the 1980's is cool. i have no idea how it works or if it's enconomicaly possible Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory The Plowshare Energy Legacy In 1957, the AEC officially established Project Plowshare to explore the use of nuclear explosives for peaceful purposes. "Plowshare had two parts," explains Schock. "There was a civil engineering component-using nuclear explosives to make canals, dams, and such-and an energy component-using nuclear explosives to stimulate natural gas reservoirs, process underground oil shale into oil, and so on." Even though Plowshare was terminated in 1977, its legacy lived on into the 1990s through energy projects in these areas and others. From 1974 through 1988, the Laboratory developed an underground coal gasification process that converted coal beds into gas without mining. This method had two benefits. First, it reached coal that, for economic reasons, could not be accessed with the usual mining techniques. Second, the method produced a combustible gas that was easy to clean-easier, in fact, than the stack gas produced by coal-fired power plants. This project and others, Schock notes, benefited from Batzel's belief in conducting large-scale demonstrations that could prove or disprove the commercial viability of a given technology. "Large-scale demonstrations were the Lab's forte because of our experience in nuclear testing," adds Schock. The Laboratory did some large experiments in Wyoming in the late 1970s to early 1980s to gasify coal seams in-place. "We started by using high explosives-we'd forgone nuclear explosives by then-and then came up with a technique that gasified the coal without explosives. It uses the natural fractures in coal and controls the burn zone through a movable oxygen injector. "In situ coal gasification is still a good idea," says Schock. "If the technology is ever implemented, it could double or triple the accessible U.S. coal reserves and has the advantage that the carbon dioxide produced by the process can be separated out and captured." In another Plowshare offshoot, the Laboratory investigated the feasibility of using nuclear explosives-and later, high explosives-to fracture oil shale. As Schock explains it, one can convert oil shale to oil by subjecting it to high temperatures and high pressures-in other words, by speeding up the geologic clock. Laboratory researchers envisioned using explosives to fracture the vast oil-shale reserves in the western U.S. so that the oil could be processed in place, which would provide an important alternative to imported oil. This effort evolved in the early 1980s into a surface oil-shale retorting process that used hot oil-shale particles as the heat carrier. It also produced a model of how oil is formed that is today used for exploration by every major oil company in the world. |
I don't think the wells went dry in Texas and Oklahoma - I think they just stopped pumping it. |
Why, were they tired of making money? |
know this one In the good oh USofA the curde oil has a high sulfur content not well like by the GREENS, so sweet crude low sulfur content must be imported from the middle east. it something about acid rain and the amount energy derived from a barrel http://www.sulphco.com/technology.htm |
OK, all bullshit aside. Do you really want to use fuel that's going to ruin your home? That acid rain has to fall somewhere. Maybe it'll fall on the farm that grows the crops that feeds your family, you know? They don't call it acid rain because it sounds scary, it's actualy H2SO4. Very dilute, yes, but it's really H2SO4. Sulfuric acid. Maybe it'll fall in the lake that you fish in. --------------------- If the oil left in the US can't be refined into anything useful then it's pretty much a dead issue. If we can't use it, it might as well not be oil. We don't have as much left as we used to anyway. We peaked in '71 in the US, and produce much less than we have in the past. Just go to www.google.com and search on "peak oil" it's not gonna hurt you to read a little. Hey, maybe you'll find something that will bury me! |
I don't know who Gold is but I do know Robert Hefner and he ain't a screwball. He is the one that decided that natural gas could be found deep (15K feet). He developed the technology to go after it then did it in South America when no one else thought it could be done. He found it and has made a ton of money since. |
I think their process was for the production of gasoline from coal, not crude oil. IIRC this had something to do with the reason the german tanks and whatnot ran on gas instead of diesel.. They couldn't make diesel synthetically. |
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There was a Swedish geologist who thought the same way, that the theory fossil fuels came from the remanants of old biological life was nonsense. "Oil doesn't come from squashed dinosaurs" was a memorable quote. He made a super deep drill hole, I dont think he found any gas though. |
Really? Huh. I knew some scientists (Bio-chemists) that back in the late 80's had "discovered" a way to "clean" coal of its sulfur content... some microbe (bacteria?) that ate sulfur, but excreted something harmless... Wonder if the same deal would work w/the oil? I know they sold it to some WV and another close stae.. PA? KY? Don't know how it FINALLY "worked out" ... but sounded promising. I THINK it was the "delevery system" that they "created" that got them the $$. Can't recall the specifics though, too long ago ;) They were in the same "business incubator" that the co. I worked for at the time was in. I was friendly w/ one of the techs and one of the "science types". |
OK, all bullshit aside, tell me how to have rainfall that does not become acidic? Normal rainfall is around pH 5.6 or acidic. What level are you concerned about when you spin the words "acid rain"? |
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Fifty years ago almost every scientist laughed at the Continental Drift theory. Those who supported this idea were ridiculed and labeled crackpots. Then Seafloor Spreading was discovered...now, there was a method that enabled the Drift theory to be possible. Now it is Ortodox. Those who once ridiculed it fell silent or lost their academic posts. Those who backed it became the new establishment heirarchy. This is called a "Paradigm Change". Sad, but this is how Science really works. |
Any crude can be refined. Desulfurization processes are common pretreatments and starting next year, all fuel sold in the US will be 50 ppm maximum sulfur. Peak oil hypothesis is based on current technologies. It totally discounts increased efficiencies, tertiary recovery processes, and reservoir modeling. On two of the most recent mammoth finds in the GoM, the producers have continually increased the reservoir sizes since initial discovery because sesimic technology has improved in the past 5 years. Fugro, one of the largest offshore seismic firms, recently upgraded their computer system using a hybrid Linux cluster, making a supercomputer out of ordinary PC-based servers and at a fraction of the cost of developing one from scratch. They cannot get the processing power fast enough so the make it. Peak Oil is a modern day Malthusian doomsday hypothesis. Go look up Thomas Malthus since you like to read. |
Back when the East Texas field was being developed, drillers had a hard time keeping the bore straight over 4000 feet. Now directional drillers can deviate a well bore to the point they can sign their name with the bent sub. And they do it with a precision of FEET. Vertical fractured Austin Chalk formations are now profitable. 20 years ago, geologists knew there was oil there but they couldn't find it. Now seismic can find these fractures and DD can tap it. Back when the Permian Basin was being developed, workovers required teams of roughnecks to replace rod guides. Now a team of three can desand a well, treat for asphaltene buildup and replace the whole production system with a downhole selective pump all in one day. The produced water of these wellls along with the high gravity made conventional sucker rod systems highly inefficient. With modern technology, they can become profitable again. You see, you "peak oil" doomsday freaks only know skewed data, not technology because if you spew your drek around people that know, you will get laughed off the planet. |
Acid rain is no longer a problem Get with the times... |
Acid rain in the context of a conversation around burning fossil fuels for power relates to the amount of sulphur dioxide released into the atmosphere. When SO2 is released into the atmosphere and H2O passes through it, you end up with H2SO4, or sulfuric acid. Water can be slightly acidic or basic depending on the charge it carries independently of its chemical combination with sulphur. For example, if you take a water molecule, H2O, and add an extra hydrogen to it, it becomes Chromate, or H30 and adds an extra hydrogen charge to the molecule. Anyway, acid rain actually contains acid. I don't think there's any spin to that so far. Here comes the spin. That shit's going to hit the ground somewhere. I know, most of the people on this board hate the environmentalists. I understand about why you would hate someone who's trying to keep you from working because of the Frilly Tailed Ren they are trying to protect, but this has to do with the contamination of the water table. Here in CA, due to the wisdom of Gov Schwartzenegger, women are coming up positive for tests for rocket fuel in their breast milk. When chemicals get released into the atmosphere, they end up somewhere. Right now, we have babies getting a little hi-test with their mothers' milk. I think that's a little fucked up. I think that ADVOCATING acid rain as a GOOD THING is a little fucked up, too. One possible technology to reduce acid rain is to use scrubbers in coal plants. It makes electricity a little more expensive, but we're going to need to burn coal for electricity soon, and we might as well do it in such a way that we don't ruin any more of our landscape than we have to. Actually, I should ask you instead of putting words into your mouth. You're not advocating acid rain as a net positive, are you? |