The power of exponents never ceases to amaze me. Cecil says that roughly one trillion barrels of oil have been pumped from beneath the earth’s surface. A few minutes with a conversion tool (which tells me that a barrel is equivalent to about 7.35 cubic feet) and Microsoft Excel reveal that the total volume of oil extracted so far could be contained in a cube less than one mile on a side–5,143 feet, to be precise. If that’s hard to visualize, then imagine a chunk of Lake Michigan measuring about four miles square. That’s the volume of oil we’ve used.
Looking at it another way, a trillion barrels of oil spread over the Earth’s surface would create a film about three ten-thousandths of an inch thick. A human hair is about one-thousandth of an inch in diameter, for comparison.
I read an article in PopSci or PopMech recently. They said it’s not like sucking liquid out of a lake, it’s more like sucking liquid out of a sponge.
As the oil comes out, water in the surrounding rock and dirt comes in.
I think I read another article years back that said in some oil wells, they pump CO2 or something else in to replace oil when they take a lot out, but they didn’t mention this in the PopSci mag.
There is a Denver Post article about hydraulic fracturing used to obtain natural gas in Sublette County, Wyoming, where the groundwater supply is being contaminated. Of course, a 2004 EPA report found the process “safe.”
Apologies for sounding brusque; since this thread was about the column, I assumed you were commenting on it. Here’s a link for you - I admit that the Archive Search on the Straight Dope page does not seem to call it up directly.
No probs, Una. I’ve seen a video of that Lake Peigneur incident, and that looked pretty damned hairy! That must have been scary to have seen first-hand.
