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Oil Exploration Theories- Very Interesting Read

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Old 11-09-2007, 11:30 AM
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Default Oil Exploration Theories- Very Interesting Read

I thought this was a very interesting read. Our members that are oil industry related probably already know this but for the rest of us dummies.....

Russia is far from oil's peak
By F William Engdahl


The good news is that panic scenarios about the world running out of oil any time soon are wrong. The bad news is that the price of oil is going to continue to rise. "Peak Oil" is not our problem. Politics is. Big Oil wants to sustain high oil prices. US Vice President Dick Cheney and friends are all too willing to assist.

On a personal note, I've researched questions of petroleum since the first oil shocks of the 1970s. I was intrigued in 2003 with something called the Peak Oil theory. It seemed to explain the otherwise inexplicable decision by Washington to risk all in a military move on Iraq.

Peak Oil advocates, led by former BP geologist Colin Campbell and Texas banker Matt Simmons, argued that the world faced a new crisis, an end to cheap oil, or Absolute Peak Oil, perhaps by 2012, perhaps by 2007. Oil was supposedly on its last drops. They pointed to soaring gasoline and oil prices and to the declines in output of the North Sea, Alaska and other fields as proof they were right.

According to Campbell, the fact that no new North Sea-size fields had been discovered since the North Sea in the late 1960s was proof. He reportedly managed to convince the International Energy Agency and the Swedish government. That, however, does not prove him correct.

Intellectual fossils?
The Peak Oil school rests its theory on conventional Western geology textbooks, most by American or British geologists, which claim oil is a "fossil fuel", a biological residue or detritus of either fossilized dinosaur remains or perhaps algae, hence a product in finite supply. Biological origin is central to Peak Oil theory, used to explain why oil is only found in certain parts of the world where it was geologically trapped millions of years ago.

That would mean that dinosaur remains became compressed and over tens of millions of years fossilized and were trapped in underground reservoirs perhaps 1,200-2,000 meters below the surface of the Earth. In rare cases, so goes the theory, huge amounts of biological matter should have been trapped in rock formations in the shallower ocean regions such as in the Gulf of Mexico or North Sea or Gulf of Guinea. Geology should be only about figuring out where these pockets in the layers of the earth, called reservoirs, lie within certain sedimentary basins.

An entirely alternative theory of oil formation has existed since the early 1950s in Russia, almost unknown to the West. It claims that the conventional US biological-origins theory is an unscientific absurdity that is unprovable. They point to the fact that Western geologists have repeatedly predicted finite oil over the past century, only then to find more, lots more.

Not only has this alternative explanation of the origins of oil and gas existed in theory, the emergence of Russia as the world's largest oil and natural-gas producer has been based on the application of the theory in practice. This has geopolitical consequences of staggering magnitude.

Necessity the mother of invention
In the 1950s, the Soviet Union faced "Iron Curtain" isolation from the West. The Cold War was in high gear. Russia had little oil to fuel its economy. Finding sufficient oil indigenously was a national-security priority of the highest order.

Scientists at the Institute of the Physics of the Earth of the Russian Academy of Sciences and the Institute of Geological Sciences of the Ukraine Academy of Sciences began a fundamental inquiry in the late 1940s: Where does oil come from?
In 1956, Professor Vladimir Porfir'yev announced their conclusions: "Crude oil and natural petroleum gas have no intrinsic connection with biological matter originating near the surface of the Earth. They are primordial materials which have been erupted from great depths."

The Soviet geologists had turned Western orthodox geology on its head. They called their theory of oil origin the "abiotic" theory - non-biological - to distinguish it from the Western biological theory of origins.

If they were right, oil supply on Earth would be limited only by the amount of organic hydrocarbon constituents present deep in the Earth at the time of the planet's formation. Availability of oil would depend only on technology to drill ultra-deep wells and explore into the Earth's inner regions. They also realized that old fields could be revived to continue producing, so-called self-replenishing fields. They argued that oil is formed deep in the Earth, formed in conditions of very high temperature and very high pressure, like that required for diamonds to form.

"Oil is a primordial material of deep origin which is transported at high pressure via 'cold' eruptive processes into the crust of the Earth," Porfir'yev stated. His team dismissed the idea that oil is is biological residue of plant and animal fossil remains as a hoax designed to perpetuate the myth of limited supply.

Defying conventional geology
The radically different Russian and Ukrainian scientific approach to the discovery of oil allowed the USSR to develop huge gas and oil discoveries in regions previously judged unsuitable, according to Western geological exploration theories, for the presence of oil. The new petroleum theory was used in the early 1990s, well after the dissolution of the USSR, to drill for oil and gas in a region believed for more than 45 years to be geologically barren - the Dnieper-Donets Basin in the region between Russia and Ukraine.

Following their abiotic or non-fossil theory of the deep origins of petroleum, the Russian and Ukrainian petroleum geophysicists and chemists began with a detailed analysis of the tectonic history and geological structure of the crystalline basement of the Dnieper-Donets Basin. After a tectonic and deep structural analysis of the area, they made geophysical and geochemical investigations.

A total of 61 wells were drilled, of which 37 were commercially productive, an extremely impressive exploration success rate of almost 60%. The size of the field discovered compared to the North Slope of Alaska. By contrast, US wildcat drilling was considered to have a 10% success rate. Nine of 10 wells are typically "dry holes".

That Russian geophysics experience in finding oil and gas was tightly wrapped in the usual Soviet veil of state security during the Cold War era, and was largely unknown to Western geophysicists, who continued to teach fossil origins and, hence, the severe physical limits of petroleum. But slowly it begin to dawn on some strategists in and around the Pentagon well after the 2003 Iraq war that the Russian geophysicists might be on to something of profound strategic importance.
Continued Below
 

Last edited by Johnny Cetane; 11-09-2007 at 11:34 AM.
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Old 11-09-2007, 11:31 AM
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If Russia had the scientific know-how and Western geology did not, Russia possessed a strategic trump card of staggering geopolitical import. It was not surprising that Washington would go about erecting a "wall of steel" - a network of military bases and anti-missile shields around Russia to cut its pipeline and port



links to western Europe, China and the rest of Eurasia.

English geographer and geopolitician Halford Mackinder's worst nightmare - a cooperative convergence of mutual interests of the major states of Eurasia, born of necessity and need for oil to fuel economic growth - was emerging. Ironically, it was the blatant US grab for the vast oil riches of Iraq and, potentially, of Iran that catalyzed closer cooperation between traditional Eurasian foes, China and Russia, and a growing realization in western Europe that their options too were narrowing.

The peak king
Peak Oil theory is based on a 1956 paper by the late Marion King Hubbert, a Texas geologist working for Shell Oil. He argued that oil wells produced in a bell-curve manner, and once their "peak" was hit, inevitable decline followed. He predicted that US oil production would peak in 1970. A modest man, he named the production curve he invented Hubbert's Curve, and the peak as Hubbert's Peak. When US oil output began to decline in about 1970, Hubbert gained a certain fame.

The only problem was, it peaked not because of resource depletion in the US fields. It "peaked" because Shell, Mobil, Texaco and the other partners of Saudi Aramco were flooding the US market with dirt-cheap imports from the Middle East, tariff-free, at prices so low California and many Texas domestic producers could not compete and were forced to shut their wells.

Vietnam success
While the US oil multinationals were busy controlling the easily accessible large fields of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iran and other areas of cheap, abundant oil during the 1960s, the Russians were busy testing their alternative theory. They began drilling in a supposedly barren region of Siberia. There they developed 11 major oilfields and one giant field based on their deep abiotic geological estimates. They drilled into crystalline basement rock and hit black gold of a scale comparable to the Alaska North Slope.

They then went to Vietnam in the 1980s and offered to finance drilling costs to show that their new geological theory worked. Russian company Petrosov drilled in Vietnam's White Tiger oilfield offshore into basalt rock some 5,000 meters down and extracted 6,000 barrels a day of oil to feed the energy-starved Vietnam economy. In the USSR, abiotic-trained Russian geologists perfected their knowledge and the Soviet Union emerged as the world's largest oil producer by the mid-1980s. Few in the West understood why, or bothered to ask.

Dr J F Kenney is one of the only Western geophysicists who has taught and worked in Russia, studying under Vladilen Krayushkin, who developed the huge Dnieper-Donets Basin. Kenney told me in a recent interview that "alone to have produced the amount of oil to date that [Saudi Arabia's] Ghawar field has produced would have required a cube of fossilized dinosaur detritus, assuming 100% conversion efficiency, measuring 19 miles [30.5 kilometers] deep, wide and high." In short, an absurdity.

Western geologists do not bother to offer hard scientific proof of fossil origins. They merely assert their belief as a holy truth. The Russians have produced volumes of scientific papers, most in Russian. The dominant Western journals have no interest in publishing such a revolutionary view. Careers, entire academic professions are at stake, after all.

Closing the door
The 2003 arrest of Russian Mikhail Khodorkovsky, of Yukos Oil, took place just before he could sell a dominant stake in Yukos to ExxonMobil after a private meeting with Cheney. Had Exxon gotten the stake, it would have had control of the world's largest resource of geologists and engineers trained in the abiotic techniques of deep drilling.

Since 2003, Russian scientific sharing of knowledge has markedly lessened. Offers in the early 1990s to share knowledge with US and other oil geophysicists were met with cold rejection, according to American geophysicists involved.

Why then the high-risk war to control Iraq? For a century, US and allied Western oil giants have controlled world oil via control of Saudi Arabia or Kuwait or Nigeria. Today, as many giant fields are declining, the companies see the state-controlled oilfields of Iraq and Iran as the largest remaining base of cheap, easy oil.

With the huge demand for oil from China and now India, it becomes a geopolitical imperative for the United States to take direct military control of those Middle East reserves as fast as possible. Cheney came to the job of vice president from Halliburton Corp, the world's largest oil-geophysical-services company. The only potential threat to that US control of oil just happens to lie inside Russia and with the now-state-controlled Russian energy giants.

According to Kenney, Russian geophysicists used the theories of brilliant German scientist Alfred Wegener fully 30 years before Western geologists "discovered" Wegener in the 1960s. In 1915, Wegener published the seminal text The Origin of Continents and Oceans, which suggested an original unified landmass or Pangaea more than 200 million years ago that separated into present continents by what he called continental drift.

Up to the 1960s, supposed US scientists such as Dr Frank Press, the White House science adviser, referred to Wegener as "lunatic". Geologists at the end of the 1960s were forced to eat their words as Wegener offered the only interpretation that allowed them to discover the vast oil resources of the North Sea.

Perhaps in some decades Western geologists will rethink their mythology of fossil origins and realize what the Russians have known since the 1950s. In the meantime, Moscow holds a massive energy trump card.


F William Engdahl, author of A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order, Pluto Press Ltd. To contact: www.engdahl.oilgeopolitics.net.

(Copyright 2007 F William Engdahl.)
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Central_Asia/II27Ag01.html
 
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Old 11-09-2007, 11:48 AM
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Uh, thats interesting but there actuall is more oil in Northern Alberta and Saskatchewan than in much of the middle Eastern Countries....its tied up in oilsands and the problem is that is it a pretty long process to extract and process it. Messy business let me tell ya.
 
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Old 11-09-2007, 11:54 AM
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I bet it's messy! Is it cost effective? It seems like it would be a really expensive process.
 
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Old 11-09-2007, 11:58 AM
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Yeah its expensive...pumps dont last very long when you run sand through them...with oil at a $100 a barreel - it is cost effective.

The biggest problem is water....you need hundreds of thousands (maybe millions) of gallons of water to mix the sand with. Plus, ist pretty hard on the enviroment as well.

Theres more info here: http://www.syncrude.ca/users/folder.asp - look at the stat there...1.7 Billion barrels theyve made. Some pics are here: http://www.syncrude.ca/users/folder.asp?FolderID=5703

I spend 2 or 3 days a month there (takes me the rest of the month to get my coveralls clean)....
 

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Old 11-09-2007, 12:47 PM
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That is an awesome website. They really lay it all out for you to discover. That's a hell of a process. I can't imagine anything staying clean for more than a millisecond. It has to be hard as hell on just about every piece of equipment used too.

It seems like they at least try and affect the environment as little as possible. Whether it's all a smoke and mirrors show I don't know but it looks like they really try. It looks like they reclaim roughly 24% of all land disturbed. I don't think that's terrible judging by what they have to do to the land to get the sand out.
 
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Old 11-09-2007, 12:47 PM
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very interesting read..........I knew some of that but not all

the whole oil issue is scaring me and most people...I think this mess is gonna bring alot of things to a standstill and we will see a snowball effect with high posibilities of recession.


I also think there is alot of undiscovered oil out there tooo but getting it and processing it is yet another story that IMHO will only continue to rise in cost

a **** ton of more oil related info is here http://www.eia.doe.gov/
 
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Old 11-09-2007, 12:58 PM
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I've watched this for some yrs , it seems many people never think much about what we are told , from memory no fossils have ever been found below a relatively shallow depth , as compared to oil , some shallow but , most that we find now is so much deeper than any fossils have ever been found .
The media being owned by either the oil companies or there pals , is so manipulative/propaganda , that we need to think about everything is says , one of the precepts of propaganda is that if you can not hide the truth that you mix it with enough lies that nobody can figure it out .
This is why the same " they " are trying to get more control of the internet , because this is about the only way for many to keep informed , its hard to do what ever to an informed populace .
 
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Old 11-09-2007, 01:25 PM
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I don't know much..I'll admit that, but I think right now there is a big difference in needing to find oil resources vs. wanting to find oil resources. Right now there isn't an incentive to go looking for new reserves, or if they are they're not announcing it. They know what they're doing. It's not like I'm going to walk out into the world and start looking on my own so I'm/we're at the mercy of the knowledge/information given to us. Profits for everyone are through the roof right now for most parties involved. As long as a perceived shortage can be maintained everyone is happy....unless you're the end user. Not that everything is a conspiracy theory but they really have no incentive right now to go find more.

And as John said, you can't trust the media. The majority of what we see on the nightly news or read in the papers comes initially from the New York Times in some form or another. They basically dictate the majority of what we're told. If they're don't give us the whole story, and we don't try to find it for ourselves, we're at their mercy. As long as people keep feeding information to the media that we're expecting unusually high demands are extremely low supplies then the market is just going to keep driving the price up.

Myself, I don't think it matters if oil is $1000 a barrel as long as the economy follows and I have to believe that sooner or later the economy will follow. We're struggling a little right now because we're not keeping pace. When the people delivering and shipping goods need to charge more because of oil prices the rest of us will start charging more for what we do. At some point we'll have to. That's the point the economy starts to follow. It will take time, a lot of time, to trickle through the ranks and masses but it's going to have to happen if we're to survive. Call me crazy and informed but it seems inflation has a funny way of spurring economic growth for us.

Right now, it's like buying oil from Ebay. How bad do you want it and how much do you want to pay? We need it really bad and we're willing to pay a lot.
 

Last edited by Johnny Cetane; 11-09-2007 at 01:32 PM.
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Old 11-09-2007, 01:41 PM
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Don't believe everything you read and especially from a site that is politically motivated. I know Colin Campbell personally and can tell you that he himself has political ties and motivations. That publication was generated to target the public with half truths. We are nowhere near running out of oil or gas and in fact, to discredit the publication, have found new reservoirs in the Gulf of Mexico and the North Sea that dwarf any in existance. I'm currently working on the "Mars" project in the Gulf, the "Sakhalin Island" (which will set a world record for deepest drilled laterals) project in Russia, and two others in the North Sea. The "Peak Oil" theory is questionable and seems to be a method of driving regional pricing. My father and I have always said that dinosaurs had nothing to do with oil reserves and we were always scrutanized for saying such. I wrote an SPE paper 4 years ago that got peoples attention and now we have geologists coming out of the woodwork supporting the idea. How does an organic being turn into a hydrocarbon? No one has yet to be able to explain or prove that. Kindof like the "theory" of evolution.
 

Last edited by DangerousDuramax; 11-09-2007 at 02:38 PM.


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