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---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Tue, 18 Oct 2005 03:59:07 -0700
From: Les Lemke <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To: <Undisclosed-Recipient:;>
Subject: [TheEagle-L] Oil Fields Are Refilling...Naturally - Sometimes
Rapidly
Source:
http://educate-yourself.org/cn/oilfieldsrefilling10apr05.shtml
Oil Fields Are Refilling...
Naturally - Sometimes Rapidly
By Robert Cooke, Staff Writer - Newsday.com
http://educate-yourself.org/cn/oilfieldsrefilling10apr05.shtml
Posted April 10, 2005
Original Pub. April 16, 2002
http://www.rense.com/general63/refil.htm
There Are More Oil Seeps Than All The Tankers On Earth
Deep underwater, and deeper underground, scientists see surprising hints that
gas and oil deposits can be replenished, filling up again, sometimes rapidly.
Although it sounds too good to be true, increasing evidence from the Gulf of
Mexico suggests that some old oil fields are being refilled by petroleum
surging up from deep below, scientists report. That may mean that current
estimates of oil and gas abundance are far too low.
Recent measurements in a major oil field show "that the fluids were changing
over time; that very light oil and gas were being injected from below, even as
the producing [oil pumping] was going on," said chemical oceanographer Mahlon
"Chuck" Kennicutt. "They are refilling as we speak. But whether this is a
worldwide phenomenon, we don't know."
Also not known, Kennicutt said, is whether the injection of new oil from
deeper strata is of any economic significance, whether there will be enough to
be exploitable. The discovery was unexpected, and it is still "somewhat
controversial" within the oil industry.
Kennicutt, a faculty member at Texas A&M University, said it is now clear
that gas and oil are coming into the known reservoirs very rapidly in terms of
geologic time. The inflow of new gas, and some oil, has been detectable in as
little as three to 10 years. In the past, it was not suspected that oil fields
can refill because it was assumed the oil formed in place, or nearby, rather
than far below.
According to marine geologist Harry Roberts, at Louisiana State University,
"petroleum geologists don't accept it as a general phenomenon because it
doesn't happen in most reservoirs. But in this case, it does seem to be
happening. You have a very leaky fault system that does allow it to migrate in.
It's directly connected to an oil and gas generating system at great depth."
What the scientists suspect is that very old petroleum -- formed tens of
millions of years ago -- has continued migrating up into reservoirs that oil
companies have been exploiting for years. But no one had expected that depleted
oil fields might refill themselves.
Now, if it is found that gas and oil are coming up in significant amounts,
and if the same is occurring in oil fields around the globe, then a lot more
fuel than anyone expected could become available eventually. It hints that the
world may not, in fact, be running out of petroleum.
"No one has been more astonished by the potential implications of our work
than myself," said analytic chemist Jean Whelan, at the Woods Hole
Oceanographic Institution, in Massachusetts. "There already appears to be a
large body of evidence consistent with ... oil and gas generation and migration
on very short time scales in many areas globally," she wrote in the journal Sea
Technology.
"Almost equally surprising," she added, is that "there seem to be no
compelling arguments refuting the existence of these rapid, dynamic migration
processes."
The first sketchy evidence of this emerged in 1984, when Kennicutt and
colleagues from Texas A&M University were in the Gulf of Mexico trying to
understand a phenomenon called "seeps," areas on the seafloor where sometimes
large amounts of oil and gas escape through natural fissures.
"Our first discovery was with trawls. We knew it was an area of massive
seepage, and we expected that the oil seeps would poison everything around" the
site. But they found just the opposite.
"On the first trawl, we brought up over two tons of stuff. We had a tough
time getting the nets back on board because they were so full" of very
odd-looking sea.floor creatures, Kennicutt said. "They were long strawlike
things that turned out to be tube worms.
"The clams were the first thing I noticed," he added. "They were pretty big,
like the size of your hand, and it was obvious they had red blood inside, which
is unusual. And these long tubes -- 3, 4 and 5 feet long -- we didn't know what
they were, but they started bleeding red fluid, too. We didn't know what to
make of it."
The biologists they consulted did know what to make of it. "The experts
immediately recognized them as chemo-synthetic communities," creatures that get
their energy from hydrocarbons -- oil and gas -- rather than from ordinary
foods. So these animals are very much like, but still different from, recently
discovered creatures living near very hot seafloor vent sites in the Pacific,
Atlantic and other oceans.
The difference, Kennicutt said, is that the animals living around cold seeps
live on methane and oil, while the creatures growing near hot water vents
exploit sulfur compounds in the hot water.
The discovery of abundant life where scientists expected a deserted seafloor
also suggested that the seeps are a long-duration phenomenon. Indeed, the clams
are thought to be about 100 years old, and the tube worms may live as long as
600 years, or more, Kennicutt said.
The surprises kept pouring in as the researchers explored further and in more
detail using research submarines. In some areas, the methane-metabolizing
organisms even build up structures that resemble coral reefs.
It has long been known by geologists and oil industry workers that seeps
exist. In Southern California, for example, there are seeps near Santa Barbara,
at a geologic feature called Coal Oil Point. And, Roberts said, it's clear that
"the Gulf of Mexico leaks like a sieve. You can't take a submarine dive without
running into an oil or gas seep. And on a calm day, you can't take a boat ride
without seeing gigantic oil slicks" on the sea surface.
Roberts added that natural seepage in places like the Gulf of Mexico "far
exceeds anything that gets spilled" by oil tankers and other sources.
"The results of this have been a big surprise for me," said Whelan. "I never
would have expected that the gas is moving up so quickly and what a huge effect
it has on the whole system."
Although the oil industry hasn't shown great enthusiasm for the idea --
arguing that the upward migration is too slow and too uncommon to do much good
-- the search for new oil and gas supplies already has been affected, Whelan
and Kennicutt said. Now, companies scan the sea surface for signs of oil slicks
that might point to new deposits.
"People are using airplane surveys for the slicks and are doing water column
fluorescence measurements looking for the oil," Whelan said. "They're looking
for the sources of the seeps and trying to hook that into the seismic evidence"
normally used in searching for buried oil.
Similar research on known oil basins in the North Sea is also under way, and
"that oil is very interesting. There are absolutely marvelous pictures of coral
reefs which formed from seepage [of gas] from North Sea reservoirs," Whelan
said.
Analysis of the ancient oil that seems to be coming up from deep below in the
Gulf of Mexico suggests that the flow of new oil "is coming from deeper, hotter
formations" and is not simply a lateral inflow from the old deposits that
surround existing oil fields, she said. The chemical composition of the
migrating oil also indicates it is being driven upward and is being altered by
highly pressurized gases squeezing up from below.
This upwelling phenomenon, Whelan noted, fits into a classic analysis of the
world's oil and gas done years ago by geochemist-geologist John Hunt. He
suggested that less than 1 percent of the oil that is generated at depth ever
makes it into exploitable reservoirs. About 40 percent of the oil and gas
remains hidden, spread out in the tiny pores and fissures of deep sedimentary
rock formations.
And "the remaining 60 percent," Whelan said, "leaks upward and out of the
sediment" via the numerous seeps that occur globally.
Also, the idea that dynamic migration of oil and gas is occurring implies
that new supplies "are not only charging some reservoirs at the present time,
but that a huge fraction of total oil and gas must be episodically or
continuously bypassing reservoirs completely and seeping from surface sediments
on a relatively large scale," Whelan explained.
So far, measurements involving biological and geological analysis, plus
satellite images, "show widespread and pervasive leakage over the entire
northern slope of the Gulf of Mexico," she added.
"For example, Ian MacDonald at Texas A&M has published some remarkable
satellite photographs of oil slicks which go for miles in the Gulf of Mexico in
areas where no oil production is occurring." Before this research in oil basins
began, she added, "changes in reservoired oils were not suspected, so no
reliable data exists on how widespread the phenomenon might be in the Gulf
Coast or elsewhere."
The researchers, especially the Texas team, have been working on this subject
for almost 15 years in collaboration with oil industry experts and various
university scientists. Their first focus was on the zone called South Eugene
Island block 330, which is 150 miles south of New Orleans. It is known as one
of the most productive oil and gas fields in the world. The block lies in water
more than 300 feet deep.
As a test, the researchers attempted to drill down into a known fault zone
that was thought to be a natural conduit for new petroleum. The drilling was
paid for by the U.S. Department of Energy.
Whelan recalled that as the drill dug deeper and deeper, the project seemed
to be succeeding, but then it abruptly ended in failure. "We were able to
produce only a small amount of oil before the fault closed, like a giant
straw," probably because reducing the pressure there allowed the fissure to
collapse.
In addition to the drilling effort and the inspection of seeps, Whelan and
her colleagues reported that three-dimensional seismic profiles of the
underground reservoirs commonly show giant gas plumes coming from depth and
disrupting sediments all the way to the surface.
This also shows that in an area west of the South Eugene Island area, a giant
gas plume originates from beneath salt about 15,000 feet down and then disrupts
the sediment layers all the way to the surface. The surface expression of this
plume is very large -- about 1,500 feet in diameter. One surprise, Whelan said,
was that the gas plume seems to exist outside of faults, the ground fractures,
which at present are the main targets of oil exploration.
It is suspected that the process of upward migration of petroleum is driven
by natural gas that is being continually produced both by deeply buried
bacteria and from oil being broken down in the deeper, hotter layers of
sediment. The pressures and heat at great depth are thought to be increasing
because the ground is sinking -- subsiding -- as a result of new sediments
piling up on top. The site is part of the huge delta formed over thousands of
years by the southward flow of the massive Mississippi River. Like other major
deltas, the Mississippi's outflow structure is continually being built from
sands, muds and silts washed off the continent.
Analysis of the oil being driven into the reservoirs suggests they were
created during the so-called Jurassic and Early Cretaceous periods (100 million
to 150 million years ago), even before the existing basin itself was formed.
This means the source rock is buried and remains invisible to seismic imaging
beneath layers of salt.
In studying so-called biomarkers in the oil, Whelan said, it was concluded
that the oil is closely related to other very old oils, implying that it "was
probably generated very early and then remained trapped at depth until
recently." And, she added, other analyses "show that this oil must have
remained trapped at depths and temperatures much greater than those of the
present-day producing reservoirs."
At great depth, where the heat and pressure are high enough, she explained,
methane is produced by oil being "cracked," and production of gas "is able to
cause sufficient pressure to periodically open the fracture system and allow
upward fluid flow of methane, with entrapment of oil in its path."
Copyright © 2002, Newsday, Inc.
http://www.newsday.com/features/ny-feat-hcov0416.story
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