# Why are oil fields in such weird places? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [January 7, 2007, 10:12am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-are-oil-fields-in-such-weird-places/387042 "2007-01-07T10:12:58Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 16\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![Niceotope](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/3ec8ea/32.png) [@Niceotope](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Niceotope)\ **Post date:** [January 7, 2007, 10:12am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-are-oil-fields-in-such-weird-places/387042/1 "2007-01-07T10:12:58Z")
Hi, If oil is formed over millions of years by decaying living matter like plankton and vegetation, why are there huge deposits in places like Siberia, Texas and the Middle East where it seems there has never been much living matter? I think I understand how oil from plankton etc. gets deep under the sea (plate tectonics) but how do land-based deposits get so deep and form pockets of crude in such massive quantities? Are there new oil fields forming? Could someone point me to a map of world oil deposits, can’t find one. Thanks Niceotope ---
**Author:** ![Ice\_Wolf](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/dfb087/32.png) [@Ice\_Wolf](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ice_Wolf)\ **Post date:** [January 7, 2007, 10:24am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-are-oil-fields-in-such-weird-places/387042/2 "2007-01-07T10:24:08Z")
There a map [here.](http://wolf.readinglitho.co.uk/mainpages/oilmap.html) ---
**Author:** ![Der\_Trihs](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/der_trihs/32/233_2.png) [@Der\_Trihs](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Der_Trihs)\ **Post date:** [January 7, 2007, 10:30am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-are-oil-fields-in-such-weird-places/387042/3 "2007-01-07T10:30:13Z")
Just because there’s not much life there now doesn’t mean there wasn’t in the past. Some of them even until recent times; many of the the desert regions in the ME are human-made. As far as how oil gets so deep, as I understand it it’s simply because layer after layer of debris settles on top of it ( well before it’s oil ), until it all fuses to rock. The same in the ocean; I don’t believe plate tectonics has much to do with it. ---
**Author:** ![Aquila\_Be](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/a698b9/32.png) [@Aquila\_Be](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Aquila_Be)\ **Post date:** [January 7, 2007, 11:04am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-are-oil-fields-in-such-weird-places/387042/4 "2007-01-07T11:04:52Z")
One of Saturn’s moons, Titan is awash with fossil fuels. [usc.edu](http://viterbi.usc.edu/news/news/2005/2005_03_09_titan.htm) > [@](#): > > That rich organic soup covers Titan in a gooey mud of methane, ethane, acetylene and propane — what on Earth would be considered one colossal oil refinery. If oxygen were present, Titan’s air would ignite with the stroke of a match. There is an alternative theory as to how such an enormous quantity of oil is actually available, and it has nothing much to do with dead life forms (except to the extent that they might modify petroleum. Thomas Gold has advanced the theory that: > [@](#): > > most hydrocarbons on Earth are not “fossil fuels” but part of the primordial “stuff” from which Earth itself was formed some 4.5 billion years ago. [LINK](http://www.oilscenarios.info/pollyana.htm) The link has a number of pro and con opinions, so take it or leave it. I’m fairly agnostic on the topic but I just don’t think it plausible that the enormous amounts of oil already found and consumed, and the stuff still in known reserves, could have ever come from dead surface animals. ---
**Author:** ![kanicbird](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/5f8ce5/32.png) [@kanicbird](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/kanicbird)\ **Post date:** [January 7, 2007, 11:34am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-are-oil-fields-in-such-weird-places/387042/5 "2007-01-07T11:34:19Z")
[QUOTE=Ice Wolf] There a map here. [/QUOTE] That map must be showing reserves know and estimated that can be pumped. Doesn’t Canada have many times the reserves of Saudi Arabia in tar sands, and the US in shale oil, both which must be mined? ---
**Author:** ![FRDE](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/e68b1a/32.png) [@FRDE](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/FRDE)\ **Post date:** [January 7, 2007, 11:53am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-are-oil-fields-in-such-weird-places/387042/6 "2007-01-07T11:53:35Z")
Maybe it is more a matter that if they were not in weird places we would have found and exploited them years ago. In the UK coal mining was not particularly difficult at first, then it got harder and the mines had to get deeper - even going under sea. Oil has been used since ancient times for light, olive oil and later whale oil. At some stage people found easily accessable mineral ‘oil’ - then got smart at looking for it and getting at the more difficult reserves. There are probably things that we take for granted because they are easily accessible, for example in the UK, until recently, drinking water was easy to obtain. If it was not relatively abundant, we would probably have generated a shortage and started hunting for water in undersea aquifers. ---
**Author:** ![Common\_Tater](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/common_tater/32/13846_2.png) [@Common\_Tater](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Common_Tater)\ **Post date:** [January 7, 2007, 11:54am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-are-oil-fields-in-such-weird-places/387042/7 "2007-01-07T11:54:10Z")
Regardless of how oil is formed, isn’t it unlikely that most/some/all of it is only located relatively near the surface of earth? ---
**Author:** ![kanicbird](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/5f8ce5/32.png) [@kanicbird](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/kanicbird)\ **Post date:** [January 7, 2007, 12:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-are-oil-fields-in-such-weird-places/387042/8 "2007-01-07T12:03:44Z")
[QUOTE=Common Tater] Regardless of how oil is formed, isn’t it unlikely that most/some/all of it is only located relatively near the surface of earth [/QUOTE] ? Sort of. There are theories that there is deep fresh water reserves, if so wouldn’t oil float to the top? ---
**Author:** ![Shagnasty](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/9dc877/32.png) [@Shagnasty](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Shagnasty)\ **Post date:** [January 7, 2007, 12:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-are-oil-fields-in-such-weird-places/387042/9 "2007-01-07T12:36:47Z")
[QUOTE=Aquila Be] I’m fairly agnostic on the topic but I just don’t think it plausible that the enormous amounts of oil already found and consumed, and the stuff still in known reserves, could have ever come from dead surface animals. [/QUOTE] That is one alternative (minor crackpot theory) that I can easily believe as a somewhat informed layperson. Huge oil (and natural gas) deposits very deep underground just don’t sound like something that would have been formed by surface vegetation even over millions of years. People that study the stuff say that it is however so I will outwardly pretend that it was until someone proves us right. ---
**Author:** ![Pushkin](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/ee59a6/32.png) [@Pushkin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Pushkin)\ **Post date:** [January 7, 2007, 12:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-are-oil-fields-in-such-weird-places/387042/10 "2007-01-07T12:59:37Z")
[QUOTE=Shagnasty] That is one alternative (minor crackpot theory) that I can easily believe as a somewhat informed layperson. Huge oil (and natural gas) deposits very deep underground just don’t sound like something that would have been formed by surface vegetation even over millions of years. People that study the stuff say that it is however so I will outwardly pretend that it was until someone proves us right. [/QUOTE] The [abiogenic petroleum origin](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiogenic_petroleum_origin) theory? ---
**Author:** ![Polycarp](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/82dd89/32.png) [@Polycarp](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Polycarp)\ **Post date:** [January 7, 2007, 1:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-are-oil-fields-in-such-weird-places/387042/11 "2007-01-07T13:46:11Z")
Okay. Bypassing abiogenic petroleum, which may or may not have a point but is scarcely a proven theory, let’s address the OP. Since oil and even more natural gas rise, floating atop denser fluids like water, concentrations of them form at the top of arches in formations where stuff-that-generates-hydrocarbons are located. An impermeable caprock keeps them below itself; permeable rocks permit them to seep upwards through themselves until they hit the caprock. But these areas where stuff-that-generates-hydrocarbons are located are themselves areas where organic matter has been concentrated. And to get that, we have to do an excursion into historical geology. The crust of the Earth is made up of individual plates of various sizes, which effectively float on the mantle and are to some extent moved by currents in it. (This is a _very_ broad and imprecise statement; the facts of the matter are substantially more complex, but it serves to provide a first-cut impression of what’s happening.) Over tens of millions of years, these plates play a planet-scale game of bumper cars, colliding with each other, being drawn one under another, being replenished at midoceanic ridges, and so on. In areas where there is subsidence, there is a natural downward pull, and sediments tend to move toward such areas. Think of the Mississippi Valley – great parts of the soil of what was once Nebraska, Iowa, Illinois, Missouri, and such have now been carried downstream to be deposited in Mississippi and Louisiana. And such areas are conducive to heavy plant growth, which in turn dies and is buried and decays. Carry this process on for millions of years, and you get sedimentary rock containing a lot of organic matter, deposited in thick layers, which continue to subside and have more layers laid down on top. This is what is called a geosyncline. They tend to form along the margins of continents, for what I think are obvious reasons. So what you have is a multi-state-sized dip in strata with more, thick strata piled on top. Eventually, this tends to “wrinkle” in folds under the pressure of moving plates and their interaction with neighboring plates. Now, revert back to looking at the planet over a geologic time scale. Pieces slide around. What was a subtropical coast with multiple rivers depositing sediments in a geosyncline, has now moved somewhere else, and may well have butted up against another plate. For example, a large piece of Gondwanaland may have drifted north to abut loosely against western Eurasia – mostly, we call this piece “Africa.” But the Afric unit of Gondwanaland was not totally the present continent, and has been rifting apart under further tectonic stresses. Mostly, that tear is not complete, and constitutes the Great Rift Valley in Eastern Africa. But the north end of it did separate more completely, producing the Red Sea. And hence, the northeastern segment of “African Gondwanaland” is not geographically a part of that continent at all, but the Arabian Peninsula. And the area where it’s bumping into Eurasia is, of course, the Persian Gulf. Today, that’s a salt-water marginal sea surrounded by arid lands. But in Gondwanaland’s heyday, it was a tropical coast. And it has huge synclinal deposits, with a lot of buried organic matter. You find oil and gas at the top of the upward folds within these former larger downward folds – geomorphologically, this is stated as “anticlines within a geosyncline.” And hence, as the northeast coast of Gondwanan Macro-Africa, now the east coast of Arabia, bumped into Asia, it folded, and anticlines formed in the geosynclinal rocks there – and the volatile fractions of the decayed organic matter in the geosyncline moved up into those anticlines, where they were trapped by the caprocks. Net result: concentrations of petroleum. Likewise, North America at one time lay on the equator, which ran something like Yellowknife to New Orleans across the continent, with what’s now the East Coast south of it and the West Coast north. Some nice geosynclines formed in various places, including the Gulf Coast (in the tropics just south of the Equator), the strip from West Texas to Colorado and Alberta, and at the northeast tropical shore – what’s now the North Slope of Alaska. Over a couple hundred millions of years, the continent rotated counterclockwise and drifted north. Same general explanation applies to nearly all the present oil and gas deposits. The oil shales and tar sands which **kanicbird** mentioned in the GD thread are such deposits in the early stages of formation. If not disturbed by us, 50 or 100 million years from now they will be oil-bearing strata. ---
**Author:** ![Ignatz](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/3be4f8/32.png) [@Ignatz](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ignatz)\ **Post date:** [January 7, 2007, 2:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-are-oil-fields-in-such-weird-places/387042/12 "2007-01-07T14:41:15Z")
[QUOTE=Ice Wolf] There a map [here.](http://wolf.readinglitho.co.uk/mainpages/oilmap.html) [/QUOTE] How interesting - to see that Kuwait has been moved to the Sinai Peninsula. ---
**Author:** ![Alive\_At\_Both\_Ends](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/73ab20/32.png) [@Alive\_At\_Both\_Ends](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Alive_At_Both_Ends)\ **Post date:** [January 7, 2007, 2:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-are-oil-fields-in-such-weird-places/387042/13 "2007-01-07T14:58:55Z")
[QUOTE=Ignatz] How interesting - to see that Kuwait has been moved to the Sinai Peninsula. [/QUOTE] They moved it in case Iraq tried to invade again. 😉 ---
**Author:** ![Bosda\_Di\_Chi\_of\_Tricor](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bosda_di_chi_of_tricor/32/16845_2.png) [@Bosda\_Di\_Chi\_of\_Tricor](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bosda_Di_Chi_of_Tricor)\ **Post date:** [January 7, 2007, 4:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-are-oil-fields-in-such-weird-places/387042/14 "2007-01-07T16:16:54Z")
Oil has **also** been found in Pennsylvania & Kentucky. Neither of which is _particularly_ Weird, except for certain neighborhoods in Louisville. ---
**Author:** ![jayjay](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/jayjay/32/6765_2.png) [@jayjay](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/jayjay)\ **Post date:** [January 7, 2007, 8:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-are-oil-fields-in-such-weird-places/387042/15 "2007-01-07T20:53:10Z")
[QUOTE=Bosda Di’Chi of Tricor] Oil has **also** been found in Pennsylvania & Kentucky. [/QUOTE] Oil was first drilled in the US in Pennsylvania, as a matter of fact. Edwin Drake erected the first oil well in the country at Titusville. Although, as a native Pennsylvanian, I have to admit that there are parts of the state that are _very_ weird… ---
**Author:** ![Bosda\_Di\_Chi\_of\_Tricor](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bosda_di_chi_of_tricor/32/16845_2.png) [@Bosda\_Di\_Chi\_of\_Tricor](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bosda_Di_Chi_of_Tricor)\ **Post date:** [January 7, 2007, 9:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-are-oil-fields-in-such-weird-places/387042/16 "2007-01-07T21:13:29Z")
[QUOTE=jayjay] Oil was first drilled in the US in Pennsylvania, as a matter of fact. Edwin Drake erected the first oil well in the country at Titusville. Although, as a native Pennsylvanian, I have to admit that there are parts of the state that are _very_ weird… [/QUOTE] Oh, I know…_I know…!_ 😃 [http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?p=8128495#post8128495](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?p=8128495#post8128495) > [@](#): > > About the time of the first oil excitement at Oil City, a company was formed composed of Isaac Neely, William H. Neely, Daniel Bostaph, Alexander Wilson, Henry Barr, Edward Murray, and others. They began drilling a well at Alum Rock, on the Isaac Neely farm. The tools and apparatus for drilling were then very crude, and progress was made very slowly. Now and then operations were suspended for want of money to carry on the work. The first drilling was done by hand, then by horse-power, and finally, after the war, work was again resumed on the well. A set of tools was obtained, which stuck in the well, and it was finally abandoned as a failure, Much gas was found, but no oil. This was the first well that was ever drilled in Richland township. Oil operations were then suspended until about 1870. In the spring of that year John Galey leased a piece of land belonging to Judge Keating, situated on the Clarion River at a place called the Grass-flats. The well was a success, producing sixty or seventy barrels per day. Excitement spread rapidly. Land was leased and other wells were drilled soon after. [http://www.rootsweb.com/~wvpleasa/tygazhis.txt](http://www.rootsweb.com/~wvpleasa/tygazhis.txt) > [@](#): > > ``` > Eureka - Population 150. Located on the Ohio River Railroad in > > ``` > > Pleasants County, 3 1/2 miles west of St Marys, the county seat. > Adams Express. Postal Telegraph. J H Reese, postmaster; Barnesdale > and Moore, oil operatores; Bear Creek Refining Co; Cochran Brothers, > hotel; John Cochran, lumber; Little Venture Oil Co; J H Reese, > railroad and express agent; Reese and Bostaph, oil producers; P > Simmons, groceries and drugs.