Article: Sustainable oil?
The source is apparently a biased (right-leaning) website, so I’m suspicious of their motives. From the limited amount of research I’ve done, it’s apparently not a new theory. Can anyone here (Una, maybe) shed more light on this?
A thread from last week on the same article.
There is nothing factually wrong with the article, but drawing any widespread conclusions is where the problems are likely to happen.
Eugene Island is one of the most important fields in the Gulf of Mexico and people have known for ages that it was an odd ball. Most fields are generally dry up after around 15 years, but this baby kept on producing. It turns out there is a particular set of cirmstances that easily account for it.
[ul]
[li]there is large active fault beneath the field[/li][li]there is a second, deeper reservoir below[/li][li]the second reservoir is significantly overpressured[/li][/ul]
When the oil was pumped out, basic physics did its thing and oil migarted up the fault, “refilling” the stuff at the top. I don’t have production figures for the field anytime after 1998, but if there was a large increase in production in 1990, it was probably due to some workover which allowed the fault to open up.
This set of circumstances might happen elsewhere, but it’s going to be very rare.
You can read about the discovery here and a little on what happened to the production here.
It’s not a new theory, but it’s one that seems always to be no closer to being proven. It’s not something I know a lot about, sadly, although I’ve researched somewhat related claims as to the odd distribution and massive extent of coal fields.
The real problem with proving or disproving it is, like coal fields, simulation of large-scale oil reserve creation is not something where we have solid scientific evidence to show a definite cause and effect. I mean, we can make coal and make oil by vastly accelerating decomposition of biomatter under the right conditions of temperature and pressure, but we can’t prove conclusively that those conditions existed, or if they are that they are what is responsible for oil and coal deposits. Thus, the field is open to many theories, and this one espoused by Gold et al is one of them. How “valid” it is is something that the couple of oil experts on here could better tell you.