Gulf Oil TUTORIAL: Solid Basics About Our Old-But-New FRIEND!
Palin'sAbortion
disaster in the next 10 years?
I say 90 ...
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"Rare mix of geological factors created rich but dangerous reserves"
By Joel Achenbach
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, July 13, 2010; HE01
IN THE OIL BUSINESS, geologists tell stories. Here was a river, they
will say. Here was a shallow sea. Here is where the sea dried up and
left only salt. Here is where the sea formed anew, and widened, and
deepened, and where sediments from another river, and the carcasses of
microorganisms, were deposited, buried, baked, until finally -- the
enchanting payoff of the story if you're an eager-beaver oil executive
-- the organic matter turned into oil.
The Gulf of Mexico is full of such stories. Unfortunately, the story
of one well, named Macondo, drilled by the rig Deepwater Horizon, has
turned into a tragedy.
The geology of the gulf is pretty close to perfect for the creation of
oil reservoirs. There are salt sheets and domes that form impermeable
caps on oil fields. There are abundant rock formations that have been
deformed into hump-shaped strata known as anticlines, natural traps
for oil.
"It traps oil and gas beautifully," said Roger Anderson, a Columbia
University geophysicist who has long studied Gulf of Mexico geology.
Anderson compares the deep-water gulf to Texas and Oklahoma more than
a century ago. The "oil patch" had its famous moments, such as the
Spindletop gusher in Beaumont, Tex., in 1901, which blew out at
100,000 barrels (4.2 million gallons) per day, and the Wild Mary well,
which spewed out of control for 11 days in Oklahoma City in 1930. That
region still produces, but there aren't many big discoveries still to
be made in the pincushioned ground.
Not so the deep water. There's oil out there, in reservoirs that can
top a billion barrels.
"It's like the old days. It's true frontier," Anderson says.
Shaped by great rivers
It's not the only such place in the world. There's abundant oil in
deep water off the coasts of Brazil and West Africa, for example. But
the gulf has its own near-unique geology, shaped by the great river
that flows into it. The Mighty Mississippi, the Father of Waters,
drains almost everything from the Rockies to the Appalachians.
Millions of years ago, the Red River, which forms part of the Texas/
Oklahoma border, was as big as the Mississippi. These rivers dumped
dead organisms into the gulf in prodigious quantities.
Those nutrients help feed thriving ecosystems and some of the richest
fisheries in the world. But the gulf is also an isolated sea, almost
walled off from the Atlantic Ocean by Cuba and the Florida and Yucatan
peninsulas. That means the gulf lacks the deep-water circulation of
open ocean.
Bad circulation means lots of anoxic layers, dead zones, places where
there's so little oxygen that organic matter doesn't decay. That's
great for the eventual creation of an oil field.
"What oil and gas is is undecayed dead organisms. Microorganisms, not
dinosaurs. So the small foraminifera and algae that lived in the ocean
and lived in the Mississippi River died and got swept out to sea and
got buried under all the mud coming out of the Mississippi. As it got
deeper and deeper, it got hotter and hotter and got cooked into oil,"
Anderson said.
Ken Deffeyes, a retired Princeton geologist who once worked for Shell
Oil and has written about the gulf, said, "The Mississippi Delta and
the Niger Delta are the only two really productive, big deltas in the
world. The Amazon, nothing. The Ganges, nothing or very, very little."
The geology story has been unfolding for more than 40 million years,
to the very origin of the gulf as a rift in the crust of the Earth.
The gulf is widening to this day. Cuba is sliding away from Texas. The
Yucatan peninsula is retreating from Louisiana. At its deepest point,
the Gulf of Mexico is more than 12,000 feet deep.
Valuable but lethal
The oil-hunters know the sub-sea escarpments and canyons the same way
hikers know mountains and rivers. They have explored the Sigsbee
Escarpment, the long cliff at the edge of the abyssal plain; they've
poked holes in the Mississippi Fold Belt and the Perdido Fan Fold
Belt.
There is one tricky consequence of the fact that the Mississippi River
deposits so much sediment in the gulf. The rapid layering of mud in
deep, low-oxygen water leads to high rates of gas formation.
The gas is valuable, potentially. It's also the major cause of the
loss of well control -- blowouts. Gas was the lethal agent in the
Deepwater Horizon explosion.
So for the petroleum executives (if not for the shrimp and fish and
turtles and so on), the gulf is a good place to drill holes in the sea
floor. But it's also a place that demands great care.
That's true even in the shallows. But the drilling rigs have marched
-- or sailed, to be more precise -- right off the continental shelf,
into very deep water, using satellite technology and precision
thrusters to fix themselves over wells drilled on the continental
slope and in the depths beyond. The oil industry looks at the gulf
covetously, for this is where roughly a third of the U.S. domestic oil
production comes from, increasingly from the deep water.
The oil companies do not drill randomly. Where the oil is, and in what
quantity, are the questions that preoccupy oil companies that need
huge amounts of capital to drill a deep-water well.
"That well is going to cost you 40 to 50 million dollars to drill, and
you can't afford to drill a lot of dry ones," said Dennis O'Neill, a
computer scientist who has worked for decades in petroleum
exploration.
So the companies use sound and radar to take snapshots of what's
hidden below the sea floor. A large vessel will tow anywhere from
eight to 20 cables, each thousands of feet long and studded with
hydrophones, which are microphones that float in the water. The vessel
will fire an air gun that creates a sound that propagates through the
water and down through the sea floor into the rock below. The
microphones pick up echoes; software creates a picture that helps the
geologists craft a story of what's below the sea floor: the type of
rock, the faulting, the salt layers, the potential traps for oil.
"In a perfect geophysical world, when you listen to the echoes of the
sound propagating and bouncing back through this rock, and plot it on
a piece of paper, you'll see what looks like a layer cake of the
geological structures," O'Neill said. If the picture that emerges
matches a plausible "story" of oil, the company can decide whether to
drill the site.
"The only way to test the hypothesis is to drill a well," O'Neill
said.
The long-term question, one that has incited great debate, is how much
oil is still out there, yet to be discovered and potentially
commercial.
Deffeyes, a leading proponent of the idea that the world needs to be
concerned with an inexorably downward turn in oil production known as
"Peak Oil," said it's time to prepare for the post-oil age. Indeed, he
says, we need to move beyond all of the nonrenewable energy resources.
The professor says, "We have about 100 years of coal plus uranium plus
natural gas plus oil. But you've got to start switching to natural gas
now. You've got to start building more nuclear power plants. But your
goal in 100 years: You've got to be 100 percent solar -- that's wind,
plants, biodiesel -- all those things are directly or indirectly
solar."
When will Peak Oil happen?
"It happened in 2005," Deffeyes said.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/07/12/AR2010071204239.html
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"Whiskey barrels were once used to collect oil gushing from wells"
By Frances Stead Sellers
Tuesday, July 13, 2010; HE06
Many countries have a modern way of measuring crude oil -- by weight.
They use the metric ton, which remains unchanged when the liquid
expands and contracts as it is pumped through pipelines or shipped in
supertankers at varying temperatures.
But the United States still calculates crude by volume, using a unit
of measurement that probably owes its heritage to the standardization
of spirits and was applied to oil during the Pennsylvania oil rush of
the 1860s: the 42-gallon barrel (or bbl).
After Edwin Drake struck oil in 1859 in Titusville, Pa., blowouts were
common, according to energy analyst Byron King. Oil workers grabbed
any vessel they could -- washtubs and casks of all sizes for storing
salt and fish -- to collect the spewing black gold, which they shipped
down the Allegheny River to Pittsburgh for refining. The most reliably
sized container at hand was the standard 40-gallon whiskey barrel.
When the oil industry sought to create its own standard, it took the
volume of the whiskey barrel and added two more gallons. Why? One
theory comes from Charles A. Whiteshot in "The Oil-Well Driller," who
cites producers agreeing in 1866 that "An allowance of two gallons
will be made on the gauge of each and every 40 gallons in favor of the
buyer."
The additional two gallons were a buyer's bonus, a bit like the 13th
bread roll in the baker's dozen. The 42-gallon barrel remains the
standard for pricing crude on the New York Mercantile Exchange.
Those are U.S. gallons, of course, as opposed to the imperial gallons
standardized by the British in 1824 (and now largely replaced by
liters). Both contain eight pints, but a U.S. pint has just 16 fluid
ounces while an imperial pint has 20. At 128 fluid ounces -- as
opposed to 160 -- a U.S. gallon is one of the few things smaller in
the New than in the Old World.
Meaning that every 42-gallon barrel of oil that flows from the Macondo
well is a little less than 35 gallons to the British.
What's more, through one of the chemical mysteries of the refinement
process, each 42-gallon barrel of crude yields about 44 gallons of
gasoline, jet fuel, heating oil and other substances.
Meaning that every 80,000 barrels (or 3,360,000 gallons) that BP soon
hopes it will capture from the well each day will result in 160,000
additional gallons of petroleum products. (U.S. gallons, that is.)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/07/12/AR2010071204151.html