I’ve asked this question around other places and NOT gotten an answer.
we’ve been pumping oil out of the ground for 100 + years -
and salt water has gone INTO where we’ve pumped.
east texas & pennslvania have lots of salt water where
there used to be lots of oil.
so they say the oceans are rising from global warming.
how much oil have we pumped out -
and saltwater gone in -
and does this offset any of that ocean rising???
thanks in advance for your help
antsy
The US uses 280 billion gallons of oil a year. A lot, but compared to all the water in the ocean, … 352,670,000,000,000,000,000 gallons, it is not even a drop in the bucket.
The sea level rise to date, which is actually incredibly hard to measure, is about 8" over the last 150 years as best we can tell. The current consensus is that this may be due to thermal expansion of the ocean, and may be accelerating in recent decades. The rest of the water cycle, including any water used for oil recovery or stashed in artificial lakes and so on, is not significant enough to change sea level.
From here, total production of oil since it started is about 700 billion barrels, or around 30 trillion gallons (at 42 US gallons to a barrel.) Some estimates are up to over 940 barrels, or almost 40 trillion gallons. But even the higher amount is roughly only about a billionth of the amount of water in the oceans. Even if all the pumped oil had been replaced by ocean water, the effect would be negligible on the level of the oceans.
I thought melting ice from polar regions was the main factor in sea-level rise.
Thermal expansion is a significant factor, currently accounting for around a third of sea level rise. But different contributions vary at different times. Unforced glacier mass loss in the 30s was briefly a dominant contributor, but in the latter portion of the 20th century the familiar factors of Arctic and Antarctic land ice loss plus thermal expansion were dominant.
Re: the OP – not only is the use of sea water in oil wells an insignificant factor as already noted, but other human interference in the water cycle is actually more relevant, namely the contribution of water table depletion to sea level rise. The impoundment of water in reservoirs is a negative factor and has outweighed it at times, but water table depletion is now overtaking it. Still, the oceans are so huge that even those factors are very small. The polar ice sheets, however, are not “small” by any stretch of the imagination, nor is the present effect of thermal expansion.
Floating ice (which most of it is) doesn’t have any effect on sea level when it melts, since it’s always displacing its weight. It’s only ice sitting on land, like Greenland or Antarctica, that makes the difference.
The flip side of this is that ice that moves from land into the water raises the sea level even if it doesn’t melt. One worry is that ice melt at the bottom of glaciers might lubricate them, and allow them to slide suddenly into the ocean, producing an abrupt rise with very little warning.
Indeed, the problem was that there was not much evidence for the acceleration of the ice loss, so the expected rise of the oceans was usually calculated to be from 1 to 2 meter rise by the end of the century.
Unfortunately evidence of the acceleration was found in recent studies so that conservative estimate and slow rise estimated before are very likely to increase.
Salt water intrusion into depleted oil reservoirs isn’t as extensive as the OP might suspect - particularly for inland reservoirs, but also for marine & coastal reservoirs. For oil to accumulate in the subsurface in the first place, there needs to be a hydraulic barrier between the reservoir and the surface to trap the oil. Such barriers would typically preclude water from entering.
That being said, hydraulic barriers can easily be compromised by the multitude of holes drilled to access the oil, creating vertical connections with the surface. And decreased reservoir pressure during oil extraction can allow salt water to flow in laterally if the reservoir formation outcrops somewhere. However, in the case of the NE USA, water injection was a common practice, and probably accounts for a large part of the saline waters in the depleted oil reservoirs.
Indeed, due to the integrity of many depleted reservoirs they are often considered viable targets for carbon sequestration, which probably wouldn’t be the case if they were directly connected to salt water bodies.
Possible causes of the putative rise (generally accepted as 4-8" in 150 years and accelerating in recent decades) include melting land ice, thermal expansion, groundwater pumping and an assortment of other notions.
Both the absolute “mean” rise and the contribution are the subject of a lot of research and papers, which is another way of saying that we don’t have a very good grasp. It is really really hard to measure “sea level” average. Most of papers on the relative contributions of various possible sources that I have seen are based on modeling, with parameterizations that, while not exactly WAGs, are at least estimates.
So, for example, one doesn’t have to look very far to find a paper which suggests that anthropogenic ground water removal and runoff along with other land-based water handling (perhaps closer to the OP’s question) contributed 42% (!) of the rise from 1961 to 2003.
“Model estimates of sea-level change due to anthropogenic impacts on terrestrial water storage”
Quote:
" We find that, together, unsustainable groundwater use, artificial reservoir water impoundment, climate-driven changes in terrestrial water storage and the loss of water from closed basins have contributed a sea-level rise of about 0.77 mm yr−1 between 1961 and 2003, about 42% of the observed sea-level rise. We note that, of these components, the unsustainable use of groundwater represents the largest contribution."
For a topic as topical as ACC, you are going to find a boatload of opinions, theories and models all neatly summarized into lay articles for public consumption within a general paradigm that anthropogenic forcings are changing sea level in a generally upward and dangerous direction, but underneath those marketing summaries, the actual science is not well settled. At all. One has to go beyond a headline of “Antarctic Ice Sheet Collapsing” to recognize that what the science says is that, based on surface fluctuations, there is a presumption that the grounding line for the ice sheet is advancing; based on modeling there is an assumption that warming of that particular ocean layer is responsible for the advance of the grounding line; based on analysis of solid surface under the ice sheet there are no retaining hills; based on the absence of retaining bumps, the ice sheet can advance more rapidly; based on modeling, the amount that will actually melt due to advancement over X period of time could in theory contribute X to sea level, all over the next 500-1000 years. But in today’s paradigm, “Collapsing Ice Sheet” gets a read and an advert click-through. Throw in a picture of a big crack in a big ice sheet (even if it has absolutely no historic context) and boom: winner headline.
And that is just FUD about the best estimanes and studies.
The 1 to 2 meters in ocean rise by the end of the century is based not only on models, but also on what the oceans did in past times.
The latest reports about the antartic and greenland actually **confirm **what many predicted or feared, an acceleration of the ice loss in those places, and it has not been counteracted at all with the affirmation that it is “not settled”; besides not being what the scientists talk about (it is mostly denier sources who claim that scientists are telling us that it is settled, a very old and tired strawman) the best information and research made point to an acceleration of the ocean rise and very likely there will be more than 1 to 2 meters of an increase by end of the century.
The point stands, all the ones that claimed that nothing was going to happen (Claiming that the ice increase in other regions was enough to counteract the observed loss) were wrong and the denier sources out there deserve at least to be told that they will not be listen to anymore as they were grosly wrong on their predictions.
You’re doing it again – the thing that I talked about here. You seem to like to discredit climate science with various combinations of appeal to the failures of generic futurism, appeal to the distortions in popular media, and now apparently appeal to one outlier paper. There is a huge difference between citing one speculative paper on sea level rise and claiming that the science on that (or other important aspects of climate change) is “not settled at all”. The implication would be that we know so little about sea level rise that we don’t even know if it will be a problem. Which is utter garbage.
What we know is well represented in the literature and is summarized in, among many other places, Chapter 13 of the IPCC AR5 WG1 report, which essentially reflects the points I made in the previous post and is supported, not by one lone outlier paper like the one you cite, but by more than 500 contemporary research papers cited at the end of the chapter. The consensus on anthropogenic contribution to sea level rise from water storage on land is that it’s subject to large annual and decadal variability, that it’s mostly a balance between water table depletion and reservoir impoundment, and that the net impact is small, each contributing several tenths of mm/yr in opposite directions. Indeed it’s been estimated that reservoir impoundment alone is responsible for the equivalent of around 0.55 mm/year of sea level reduction from 1950 to 2000!
What is also amusing about your cite of that paper as a counterargument is that it’s based entirely on models, which you never cease telling us are completely unreliable! In fact some of what it claims contributes to sea level rise is “climate-driven changes in terrestrial water storage”, a phenomenon for which there is precisely zero observational evidence and which is based entirely on hydrological models. Even so, most such models suggest that such contribution is insignificant over the long term, though it shows a lot of annual and decadal variability like the other factors.
What this leaves us with is high confidence that polar land ice melt and thermal expansion are by far the predominant contributors to sea level rise, and certainly the ones that will continue to be dominant in the future. The story of the hydrological shifts between land ice sheets and the oceans is one of the fundamental and quintessential stories in the history of the earth’s climate.
Moderator Instructions
Lest this become yet another debate about Global Warming (of which we have plenty already), let’s stick to the question in the OP with respect to the size of global oil reservoirs relative to the oceans. If this becomes a general debate I’m going to close it and suggest you take the question to Great Debates.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
OP here :
the research I’ve tried to do on this question I asked
suggested that the amount of Ice Melt from glaicers & antartica & greenland
would be much larger than whatever saltwater storage might end up in abandoned oil wells.
I hadn’t seen much about thermal expansion of water.
a bigger thing I notice is the land subsidence - big cities actually pushing down
the earth & rock under them. THAT is going to be a very large problem
for cities like NYC & Miami & other places.
again thank you all very much for considering this question seriously.
I got NO reply from other places I asked this same Q at.
antsy
Almost all land subsidence in the U.S. comes from the removal of groundwater. The weight of buildings is comparatively trivial. In NYC, in fact, it’s negative - skyscrapers weigh less than the amount of rock removed to create their foundations.
edit: I just read the moderators warning. My skeptical global warming rant removed.
Generally true, yes. But there are numerous factors affecting subsidence, though groundwater tends to dominate: glacial isostatic adjustment (GIA) – the “bounceback” still going on from glacier retreat, permafrost degradation, tectonic processes, and others. Still, subsidence due to groundwater depletion is relatively localized and not globally very important, though if it’s occurring where you happen to live, like in the Chesapeake Bay area which has the highest subsidence rate on the Atlantic coast, then it’s pretty important! The area is subsiding due to both groundwater depletion and GIA. Ironically, GIA – which generally results in uplift – contributes to subsidence there due to collapse of a geological structure called the peripheral bulge that is dropping due to GIA rebound in adjacent areas.
But globally and over the long term, sea level rise due to polar ice melt and thermal expansion is the real elephant in the room.
All no doubt true. But I was responding to the claim that the weight of big cities pushes down the land. I continue to reject that it’s at all significant. Is that not correct?
Yes, sorry, I wasn’t disagreeing with you at all, just clarifying.
Seems a simple question to answer, or at least to put a definitive upper limit on.
The surface area of the world’s oceans is 361 million km[sup]2[/sup].
Taking Colobri’s upper estimate of 40 trillion gallons of petroleum extracted from the earth, let us assume that an equal quantity of water has been taken from the oceans and been pumped into the ground. That’s 151 billion m[sup]3[/sup]. If we imagine that this water had been scraped off of the surface of the ocean, how thick of a layer would that be?
151E9/(361E6 * 1000 * 1000) = 0.000000418 meters, or 0.4 mm.
So at absolute best, pumping seawater into the ground to replace all the petroleum we’ve extracted would lower global ocean levels by just 0.4 mm. Current sea level rise is measured in inches (1 inch = 25.4 mm), so the effect would be pretty small, even if we actually were pumping that much seawater into the ground (which we’re not).