Hollow Earth?
The topic is oil. The petroleum kind. Our world lives, eats, breathes and sleeps with it. From plastics to adhesives to the millions of miles of roads to the billions of gallons of fuel, we've found a thousand ways to use it and are falling over ourselves to take as much as we can. I've no real data, but suffice to say we've taken billions if not trillions of barrels out of the earth since its discovery. Barrels are several gallons, so the actual volume in gallons is, in my head, unimaginable. Oil underground is under pressure, I imagine it from the untold tons of earth which covers it, and must exert the same pressure back to maintain harmony. The question I pose is - What, exactly, replaces the oil once it is removed from the earth? I for one don't know what an oil supply looks like underground. Is it a pool? a cave? Is it like sheets, compressed between layers of rock? But in any case, once removed it would seem to me it would leave a void, and that just sounds hinky to me. I'm not doomsday prophesizing here, but does this strike anyone as off? Doesn't it seem as though either someday theres just going to be massive sinkholes opening up, or at the very least our water supply is going to be drained into them? Maybe this is a dumb question, but I've never seen it addressed in the News, Discovery Channel, any where basically, and i was just wondering if anyone had heard, or if not, if anyone would care to surmise. I look forward to hearing anything anyone would have on this subject, if only to quiet the voice in my head.
Quote: Faceto quiet the voice in my head.
that can be a problem, might want to see a shrink
water working on limestone close to the surface is the main cause of sinkholes. We just never seem to hear of depleted oil basins causing a problem. Has it been hushed up?
Oil lies in pools only in cartoons. Its not really true that a woman who wears high heels in East Texas leaves miniature gushers in her wake.
Oil is the product of bacteria, this is one reason why played out oil fields always seem to have some more in them.
Shale oil often requires high temperature and pressure purging to release the oil and gas underground and bring it to the surface.
Oil in Wyoming is probably seven times more plentiful than in Saudi Arabia.
Drilling deep holes has so far not emptied anything except aquifers.
Quote: FaceI have been blessed/cursed with a lot of free time over the years. I also have a problem with thinking too much. This has lead to a number of off-the-wall questions that I've come up with to keep my brain busy, and also to share with others in my circle as I enjoy making people think. IMO, too many people KNOW, so much so that I believe THINKING is becoming a lost art. But anyways... I came up with a question to which I have no answer. Throwing it around my small and to some extent dull circle of friends hasn't come to any other conclusion than 'Uhh, I dunno...get a hobby' =P Since I have had the time (and to some extent, pleasure) of seeing the myriad of topics and what I consider to be a very well rounded group of intelligent and educated people on this site, I thought I'd pose this question to you, the forum, to find an answer or at least keep my brain busy and rust free. Keep in mind I am in no way enlightened on the subject so some facts may be wrong, which I don't mind (would actually prefer) being corrected on, just try not to let my errors cast a shadow over the real subject at hand.
The topic is oil. The petroleum kind. Our world lives, eats, breathes and sleeps with it. From plastics to adhesives to the millions of miles of roads to the billions of gallons of fuel, we've found a thousand ways to use it and are falling over ourselves to take as much as we can. I've no real data, but suffice to say we've taken billions if not trillions of barrels out of the earth since its discovery. Barrels are several gallons, so the actual volume in gallons is, in my head, unimaginable. Oil underground is under pressure, I imagine it from the untold tons of earth which covers it, and must exert the same pressure back to maintain harmony. The question I pose is - What, exactly, replaces the oil once it is removed from the earth? I for one don't know what an oil supply looks like underground. Is it a pool? a cave? Is it like sheets, compressed between layers of rock? But in any case, once removed it would seem to me it would leave a void, and that just sounds hinky to me. I'm not doomsday prophesizing here, but does this strike anyone as off? Doesn't it seem as though either someday theres just going to be massive sinkholes opening up, or at the very least our water supply is going to be drained into them? Maybe this is a dumb question, but I've never seen it addressed in the News, Discovery Channel, any where basically, and i was just wondering if anyone had heard, or if not, if anyone would care to surmise. I look forward to hearing anything anyone would have on this subject, if only to quiet the voice in my head.
I am not a total expert, but I do know a few things on it. First, a bbl of oil is 42 gallons. Like many things, the cause was not thought out. When they tapped oil in 1859 or so they had to put it in something. Whiskey barrels were handy. They were 42 gallons. Since the buyer had to carry it they just bought the whole thing. The unit of measure was born and stayed the same, though some countries, principally the communist or former communist ones, sometimes use "tonnes." Why you would measure a liquid by weight instead of volume is beyond me, maybe that helps explain that system failing.
Estimates I read say 1 trillion or so barrels have been extracted since the first well. Since 1980 numbers seem to average say 65 million bbls per day. That is 23 billion per year. Gives 750 billion since 1980. I'm not going to do every year back to 1865, but production before the early 1960s is much lower and before the 1950s much much lower. 1 trillion since discovery seem a nice, round number.
A gallonis .13 cubic feet. A barrel is thus 5.5 cubic feet rounded. So 5.5 trillion cubic feet of oil has been removed from the gound since founding. The empire state building is 37 million cubic feet. Rouded again this is 148,650 empire state builings. Or one for every 2,020 people in the USA or again one for every 47,090 people in the world which is a more "fair" measurement since we are talking world production. For more prespective, 21,000 people work in the Empire State Building. Yet another way there are 57 million square miles of land in the world the rest covered with water. Ignoring offshore drilling that is one Empier State Building removed for every 383 square miles of land. Or 290 for all of Nevada. If did not include water it would be about 1/3 of that.
I am aware of the danger of such measurements from a logic standpoint. But lets try anyways since I am awake early on my day off and can't sleep in. When you look at it this way, on a "per human" basis, very little relative volume has been pumped out.
So what "happens to the space?" Oil does not lie like a swimming pool. Picture more if you went to the beack and got a bucket mostly filled with sand and pebbles then put water in it. Or better yet, picture the same bucket but poured in a sticky bottle of motor oil. Getting that out is what it it like to get oil from the ground. If you really wet it and it was mostly sand, some of the liquid would flow to the surface. Think walking by the shore on the saturated sand. Now imaging increasing the pressure a million times and you get what an oil filed is like. So you suck out some of that water with a straw, being careful not to drink it. What happened to the sand and pebbles? They shifted so little you could not see the difference since the liquid was so little volume. The same with the oil field.
Underground oil exists as droplets in the spaces between rocks and also in the pores of rocks. Oil wells typically gush at first, then stop when pressure is equalized. When this happens, something needs to be pumped in to increase pressure and make oil flow again. I think water is used, because oil floats on it and it's easy to get, but inert gasses such as nitrogen could also be employed (nitrogen is relatively cheap and can be distilled off the air by cryogenic means). The fluids pumped in take the place of the extracted oil.
There are other types of oil deposits. Canada has very rich tar sands, which is a kind of mud made up of dirt and heavy oil. The problem there isn't getting at it, as it's simply mined, but to separate the oil from the dirt. This requires hot water and complex equipment. Plus heavy oil contains less of the more valuable and volatile fractions used in gasoline and other vehicular fuels. That's why light, sweet crude oil is the most expensive and heavy oil the least.
There's also shale oil, which is very easy to find in the US. I'm not sure how this oil exists on the ground, but getting it loose from the rock is expensive.
BTW speaking of fossil fuels, the US has the largest known coal reserves in the world. Energetically, they are far greater than all the oil known to exist in Saudi Arabia. Add the Canadian tar sands, the new oil deposits found in Brazil, shale oil, the gas deposits found off the coast of Israel, plus a few other finds, and you'll see there's plenty of cheap energy left yet.
Quote: NareedBTW speaking of fossil fuels, the US has the largest known coal reserves in the world. Energetically, they are far greater than all the oil known to exist in Saudi Arabia. Add the Canadian tar sands, the new oil deposits found in Brazil, shale oil, the gas deposits found off the coast of Israel, plus a few other finds, and you'll see there's plenty of cheap energy left yet.
Sadly, the USA has too many people who think we can "conserve our way to energy freedom" who will not let us tap this energy.
The surface area of the earth is
4 pi r squared.
The radius of the earth, in feet is 6,378.1km or 6,378,100 meters or 20,925,525 feet.
The surface area of the earth then is 5,502,532,127,156,920 feet. 37 trillion is 37,000,000,000,000.
So, if you take all of the oil on the earth and extract it, it would be 37,000,000,000,000 / 5,502,532,127,156,920 = 0.00672 feet = 0.08 inches.
So, all of the oil, if distributed evenly, would shave off 0.08 inches from the radius of the earth.
Piddly.
Quote: boymimbo
So, all of the oil, if distributed evenly, would shave off 0.08 inches from the radius of the earth.
Piddly.
This reminds me of a little math problem that amazed be back when I was in school. Suppose you have a piece of rope, just long enough to tightly put it around the earth at equator. Now add one meter to it.
How much space do you thing will there be between the rope and the surface of the earth now if you put the rope around it again and distribute the free space evenly? Would you be able to shove a knife between the rope and the earth surface? How about if you used an orange instead of the Earth? Would there be more free space then?
Try answering this question using your intuition, without doing the calculations.
Quote: How Stuff WorksAfter the well is completed, the crew must start the flow of oil into the well. For limestone reservoir rock, acid is pumped down the well and out the perforations. The acid dissolves channels in the limestone that lead oil into the well. For sandstone reservoir rock, a specially blended fluid containing proppants (sand, walnut shells, aluminum pellets) is pumped down the well and out the perforations. The pressure from this fluid makes small fractures in the sandstone that allow oil to flow into the well, while the proppants hold these fractures open. Once the oil is flowing, the oil rig is removed from the site and production equipment is set up to extract the oil from the well.
After the rig is removed, the crew puts a pump on the well head.
In the pump system, an electric motor drives a gear box that moves a lever. The lever pushes and pulls a polishing rod up and down. The polishing rod is attached to a sucker rod, which is attached to a pump. This system forces the pump up and down, creating a suction that draws oil up through the well.
In some cases, the oil may be too heavy to flow. In these cases, the crew drills a second hole into the reservoir and injects steam under pressure. The heat from the steam thins the oil in the reservoir, and the pressure helps push it up the well.
So it appears that sucking out the crude actually does leave voids. However, these voids are filled by water and other fluids.
Even still, in 2009 see page 7, US Energy consumption was 94.6 "quads" which is 94.6 quadrillion (10 to the 15th) BTUs or 99.8 quintillion (10 to the 18th) joules while its production was 73.5 "quads", which means you are importing 21.1 quads.
Production and Consumption in QUADS by Energy Source
| Source | Production | Consumption | Surplus |
|---|---|---|---|
| Coal | 21.83 | 20.02 | 1.81 |
| Natural Gas | 24.26 | 23.44 | 0.81 |
| Nuclear | 8.31 | 8.35 | -0.04 |
| Hydro | 2.65 | 2.66 | -0.01 |
| Non-Hydro Renewables | 5.15 | 5.12 | 0.03 |
| Oil | 11.25 | 35.21 | -23.96 |
The US has no problem with coal or natural gas. The problem with either of them is that you can't transport either of them easily off the continent whereas oil is easily shippable. Coal is used to power the electric grid. Natural gas is used both for electricity generation and heating.
This should crystallize the picture for you. Under the current consumption, the US would have to TRIPLE its oil production in order to meet its energy needs. US Oil refinery capacity is about 197 million barrels a day or 41 quads a year so you would only have to replace refineries (not create them).
For importing, currently, for 2009, here are the top 20 oil importing countries, in quads:
| Country | Import in Quads | Percent |
|---|---|---|
| Canada | 5.25 | 21.2 |
| Mexico | 2.56 | 10.4 |
| Venezuela | 2.25 | 9.1 |
| Saudi Arabia | 2.13 | 8.6 |
| Nigeria | 1.71 | 6.9 |
| Russia | 1.19 | 4.8 |
| Algeria | 1.04 | 4.2 |
| Angola | 0.97 | 3.9 |
| Iraq | 0.95 | 3.9 |
| Brazil | 0.65 | 2.6 |
| Virgin Islands | 0.59 | 2.4 |
| Colombia | 0.59 | 2.4 |
| United Kingdom | 0.52 | 2.1 |
| Ecuador | 0.39 | 1.6 |
| Kuwait | 0.39 | 1.6 |
| Netherlands | 0.3 | 1.2 |
| Norway | 0.23 | 0.9 |
| Equatorial Guinea | 0.19 | 0.8 |
| Trinidad and Tobago | 0.18 | 0.7 |
| Libya | 0.17 | 0.7 |
The issue with oil is that there are countries on that list (Nigeria, Algeria, Angola, Venezuela, Saudi Arabia, Libya) that are not particularly friendly. The US's importation of that oil means that there is a political dependence on that country.
The goal of the US should not be to increase production. Even a 50 percent increase in production (which is not achievable IMO) would still mean that the US is importing 60 percent of its oil needs. The goal of the US should be to reduce consumption. There are many ways to achieve this:
(1) Ban fuel oil as a form of heating oil (natural gas is far more effective, cheaper, and home-grown). Offer consumers a cheap way to convert from oil heat to natural gas.
(2) Purely electric vehicles or vehicles using alternative fuels (such as natural gas) that will remove the dependence on oil.
If the United States can boost production and consumption at the same time, then maybe it doesn't need to import oil from the unfriendlies.
Quote: boymimboThe issue with oil is that there are countries on that list (Nigeria, Algeria, Angola, Venezuela, Saudi Arabia, Libya) that are not particularly friendly. The US's importation of that oil means that there is a political dependence on that country.
I'd list Mexico as unfriendly but harmless. It may be that I give the wrong impression. I love America. Most Mexicans, though, dislike and resent her. I won't say Mexicans hate America, but the depth of dislike surprises me sometimes. At the same time there's a lot of envy.
Mexican oil production has been decreasing. The big off shore field, Cantarell, has been in a nose dive for years. It's just too big to dry up too soon. to be sure there's likely a lot of oil left to be discovered in the Gulf of Mexico, but the state-owned oil monopoly lacks the resources and means for deep water exploration, let alone extraction. Private investment in the field, either domestic or foreign, is forbidden by law; plus a big majority of Mexicans have swallowed the "state-owned oil equals national sovereignty" myth.
This means the US would do well to lift restrictions on off shore oil drilling and set up tax breaks for oil shale production. Increased use of coal wouldn't hurt, either.
I get a kick out of all those doomsayers who say that we're depleting our planet's resources, blah blah blah and we should all start powering our cars and heating our homes with tofu. We use petroleum to do those things because it's the cheapest available source of energy (in terms of both cost and accessibility). Once again, economics--in this case, the "low-hanging fruit principle"--dictates human behavior. When petroleum becomes more expensive, that incentive will cause us to switch to other forms of energy. And that will happen without the need for goverment edicts or insane taxes.
Obviously oil extraction from shale produces mountains of toxic waste. The problem is significant in Alberta Canada.
Quote: FaceAlthough I knew oil was sometimes 'pumped' in some locations, my memories of say, the gulf oil spill, the Iraq oil fields in Operation Desert Storm, Jed Clampett in The Beverly Hillbillies (lol) made me assume it was more like simply tapping a keg.
I think the gulf oil spill came from a well under pressure. The Kuwaiti oil fields in 91 were sabotaged and set on fire, not just spilled, and also were in operation before then.
As to the last, I hate to break the news to you, but you can't believe everything you see on TV ;)
Quote: pacomartinTo your original question, I don't think that the ground becomes geologically unstable as the result of oil removal in liquid form. It is simply not enough mass to create an effect. Similarly you don't hear about caverns collapsing because of the removal of ground water.
Obviously oil extraction from shale produces mountains of toxic waste. The problem is significant in Alberta Canada.
Although Nareed and I are in disagreement currently on another thread I have to agree with him on your oil sands comment. The enviromental standard that it is held to is a high as any part of the world and higher than most. It's tailing ponds are on a par with most mines tailing ponds. The major legitimate knock on the oil sands is that about 30% of the energy produced goes into extracting the oil from the sands. This makes the carbon footprint of the oil from the sands much larger than that of most other sources. This of course only matters if you believe in man made climate change.
Quote: kenarmanAlthough Nareed and I are in disagreement currently on another thread I have to agree with him on your oil sands comment. The enviromental standard that it is held to is a high as any part of the world and higher than most. It's tailing ponds are on a par with most mines tailing ponds. The major legitimate knock on the oil sands is that about 30% of the energy produced goes into extracting the oil from the sands. This makes the carbon footprint of the oil from the sands much larger than that of most other sources. This of course only matters if you believe in man made climate change.
But isn't that at least partially offset by the fact that the end product (extracted oil, now in usable form) is located only 2000 miles or less from where it will be consumed, instead of, say, 9,000 miles? A pipeline is a lot less energy-consumptive than an oil tanker.
Quote: kenarmanAlthough Nareed and I are in disagreement currently on another thread I have to agree with him on your oil sands comment. The enviromental standard that it is held to is a high as any part of the world and higher than most. It's tailing ponds are on a par with most mines tailing ponds. The major legitimate knock on the oil sands is that about 30% of the energy produced goes into extracting the oil from the sands. This makes the carbon footprint of the oil from the sands much larger than that of most other sources. This of course only matters if you believe in man made climate change.
30% is a bargain compared to ethanol. Given time we will get better methods. Until then I only hope they are able to keep the whackos from limiting oil sand production. After the sands, there is another "Saudi Arabia" of oil in shale oil. And we have yet to even explore more than half the world in the form or further and further out in the oceans.
