Re: replenishment

["J. Barkley Rosser, Jr." <rosserjb@xxxxxxx>]

     That there may be deeper pools of oil does not
disprove the dinosaur or other biological origin theories
and certainly does not make oil a "renewable" or
"non-finite" resource, although it may suggest that
there is more of it than many believe.
Barkley Rosser
----- Original Message -----
From: "William B. Ryan" <william_b_ryan@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: <pkt@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Thursday, April 25, 2002 10:36 AM
Subject: Re: replenishment


> This continues my post of 17 April regarding the subject of the recent
Newsday article http://csf.colorado.edu/forums/pkt/2002II/msg00071.html
>
> This is from the Wall Street Journal, April 1999
http://online.wsj.com/public/us
>
> "All of which has led some scientists to a radical theory: Eugene Island
is rapidly refilling itself, perhaps from some continuous source miles below
the Earth's surface. That, they say, raises the tantalizing possibility that
oil may not be the limited resource it is assumed to be..."
>
> ------------------------------------------
>
> Fair Use Claimed
>
> Sunday, April 25, 1999
>
> It's no crude joke: this oil field grows even as it's tapped
>
> By CHRISTOPHER COOPER
> The Wall Street Journal
>
> HOUSTON - Something mysterious is going on at Eugene Island 330.
>
> Production at the oil field, deep in the Gulf of Mexico off the coast of
Louisiana, was supposed to have declined years ago. And for a while, it
behaved like any normal field: Following its 1973 discovery, Eugene Island
330's output peaked at about 15,000 barrels a day. By 1989, production had
slowed to about 4,000 barrels a day.
>
> Then suddenly - some say almost inexplicably - Eugene Island's fortunes
reversed. The field, operated by PennzEnergy Co., is now producing 13,000
barrels a day, and probable reserves have rocketed to more than 400 million
barrels from 60 million.
>
> Stranger still, scientists studying the field say the crude coming out of
the pipe is of a geological age quite different from the oil that gushed 10
years ago.
>
> All of which has led some scientists to a radical theory: Eugene Island is
rapidly refilling itself, perhaps from some continuous source miles below
the Earth's surface. That, they say, raises the tantalizing possibility that
oil may not be the limited resource it is assumed to be.
>
> "It kind of blew me away," says Jean Whelan, a geochemist and senior
researcher from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts.
Connected to Woods Hole since 1973, Whelan says she considered herself a
traditional thinker until she encountered the phenomenon in the Gulf of
Mexico. Now, she says, "I believe there is a huge system of oil just
migrating" deep underground.
> Conventional wisdom says the world's supply of oil is finite, and that it
was deposited in horizontal reservoirs near the surface in a process that
took millions of years.
>
> Since the economies of entire countries ride on the fundamental notion
that oil reserves are exhaustible, any contrary evidence "would change the
way people see the game, turn the world view upside down," says Daniel
Yergin, a petroleum futurist and industry consultant in Cambridge, Mass.
"Oil and renewable resource are not words that often appear in the same
sentence."
>
> Doomsayers to the contrary, the world contains far more recoverable oil
than was believed even 20 years ago. Between 1976 and 1996, estimated global
oil reserves grew 72 percent, to 1.04 trillion barrels. Much of that growth
came in the past 10 years, with the introduction of computers to the oil
patch, which made drilling for oil more predictable.
>
> Still, most geologists are hard-pressed to explain why the world's
greatest oil pool, the Middle East, has more than doubled its reserves in
the past 20 years, despite half a century of intense exploitation and
relatively few new discoveries.
>
> It would take a pretty big pile of dead dinosaurs and prehistoric plants
to account for the estimated 660 billion barrels of oil in the region, notes
Norman Hyne, a professor at the University of Tulsa in Oklahoma.
>
> "Off-the-wall theories often turn out to be right," he says.
>
> Even some of the most staid U.S. oil companies find the Eugene Island
discoveries intriguing. "These reservoirs are refilling with oil,"
acknowledges David Sibley, a Chevron Corp. geologist who has monitored the
work at Eugene Island. Sibley cautions, however, that much research remains
to be done on the source of that oil. "At this point, it's not black and
white. It's gray," he says.
>
> Although the world has been drilling for oil for generations, little is
known about the nature of the resource or the underground activities that
led to its creation. And because even conservative estimates say known oil
reserves will last 40 years or more, most big oil companies haven't
concerned themselves much with hunting for deep sources like the reservoirs
scientists believe may exist under Eugene Island.
>
> Economics never hindered the theorists, however. One, Thomas Gold, a
respected astronomer and professor emeritus at Cornell University in Ithaca,
N.Y., has held for years that oil is actually a renewable, primordial syrup
continually manufactured by the Earth under ultrahot conditions and
tremendous pressures.
>
> As this substance migrates toward the surface, it is attacked by bacteria,
making it appear to have an organic origin dating back to the dinosaurs, he
says.
>
> While many scientists discount Gold's theory as unproved, "it made a
believer out of me," says Robert Hefner, chairman of Seven Seas Petroleum
Inc., a Houston firm that specializes in ultradeep drilling and has worked
with the professor on his experiments. Seven Seas continues to use
"conventional" methods in seeking reserves, though the halls of the company
often ring with dissent.
>
> "My boss and I yell at each other all the time about these theories," says
Russ Cunningham, a geologist and exploration manager for Seven Seas who
isn't sold on Gold's ideas.
>
> Knowing that clever theories don't fill the gas tank, Roger Anderson, an o
ceanographer and executive director of Columbia University's Energy Research
Center in New York, proposed studying the behavior of oil in a reservoir in
hopes of finding a new way to help companies vacuum up what their drilling
was leaving behind.
>
> He focused on Eugene Island, a kidney-shaped subsurface mountain that
slopes steeply into the Gulf depths. About 80 miles off the Louisiana coast,
the underwater landscape surrounding Eugene Island is otherworldly, cut with
deep fissures and faults that spontaneously belch gas and oil.
> In 1985, as he stood on the deck of a shrimp boat towing an oil-sniffing
contraption through the area, Anderson pondered Eugene Island's strange
history.
>
> "Migrating oil and anomalous production. I sort of linked the two ideas
together," he says.
> Five years later, the U.S. Department of Energy ponied up $10 million to
investigate the Eugene Island geologic formation, and especially the oddly
behaving field at its crest. A consortium of companies leasing chunks of the
formation, including such giants as Chevron, Exxon Corp. and Texaco Corp.,
matched the federal grant.
>
> The Eugene Island researchers began their investigation about the same
time that 3-D seismic technology was introduced to the oil business,
allowing geologists to see promising reservoirs as a cavern in the ground
rather than as a line on a piece of paper.
>
> Taking the technology one step further, Anderson used a powerful computer
to stack 3-D images of Eugene Island on top of one another. That resulted in
a 4-D image, showing not only the reservoir in three spatial dimensions, but
showing also the movement of its contents over time as PennzEnergy siphoned
out oil.
>
> What Anderson noticed as he played his time-lapse model was how much oil
PennzEnergy had missed over the years. The remaining crude, surrounded by
water and wobbling like giant globs of Jell-O in the computer model, gave
PennzEnergy new targets as it reworked Eugene Island.
> What captivated scientists, though, was a deep fault in the bottom corner
of the computer scan that was gushing oil like a garden hose. "We could see
the stream," Anderson says. "It wasn't even debated that it was happening."
>
> Woods Hole's Whelan, invited by Anderson to join the Eugene Island
investigation, postulated that superheated methane gas - a compound that is
able to absorb vast amounts of oil - was carrying crude from a deep source
below. The age of the crude pushed through the stream, and its hotter
temperature helped support that theory. The scientists decided to drill into
the fault.
>
> As prospectors, the scientists were fairly lucky. As researchers they
weren't. The first well they drilled hit natural gas, a pocket so
pressurized "that it scared us," Anderson says; that well is still
producing. The second stab, however, collapsed the fault. "Some oil flowed.
I have 15 gallons of it in my closet," Anderson says. But it wasn't
successful enough to advance Whelan's theory.
>
> A third well was drilled at a spot on an adjacent lease, where the fault
disappeared from seismic view. The researchers missed the stream but hit a
fair-size reservoir, one that is still producing.
>
> It was here, in 1995, that the scientists ran out of grant money and
PennzEnergy lost interest in continuing. "I'm not discounting the
possibility that there is oil moving into these reservoirs," says William
Van Wie, a PennzEnergy senior vice president. "I question only the rate."
>
> Whelan hasn't lost interest, however, and is seeking to investigate
further the mysterious vents and seeps. While industry geologists have
generally assumed such eruptions are merely cracks in a shallow oil
reservoir, they aren't sure.
>
> Noting that many of the seeps are occurring in deep water, rather than in
the relative shallows of the continental shelf, Whelan wonders if they may
link a deeper source.
>
> This summer, a tiny submarine chartered by a Louisiana State University
researcher will attempt to install a series of measuring devices on vents
near the Eugene Island property. Whelan hopes this will give her some idea
of how quickly Eugene Island is refilling. "We need to know if we're talking
years or if we're talking hundreds of thousands of years," she says.
>
> ---------
> --
>
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