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2004-07-15 Home Front: Tech

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Posted by Steve 2004-07-15 10:03:02 AM|| || Front Page|| [11133 views since 2007-05-07] Top

#1 Even assuming Gold's hypothesis is true (his position is in the minority), getting to the 'deep Earth reserves of inorganic crude oil' requires deep drilling. Deep drilling is expensive, very expensive.

Posted by mhw 2004-07-15 10:52:43 AM|| 2004-07-15 10:52:43 AM|| Front Page Top

#2 I'm of the opinion that this's the ultimate in wishful thinking. "Fuels... buried deep underground... organic origin? Impossible!" Yeah, and coal looks exactly like chunks of prehistoric tree ferns and giant horsetails just by coincidence...

Posted by Bulldog 2004-07-15 10:59:07 AM|| 2004-07-15 10:59:07 AM|| Front Page Top

#3 Could be. But Gold's position is held by a majority of Russian oil scientists, IIRC.

Actually, Bulldog, the idea that oil comes from animal remains was *inferred* from the geological strata in which the first finds were made -- and at a time when the hot new theory in the science world was evolution. Coal is a different matter -- I come from a coal-producing state and many of us kids had chunks of coal with fern fossils in them.

It'll be interesting to watch this play out. If in fact oil basins are recharging themselves at significant rates from below, in time periods of years and not centuries, it will have a big impact geopolitically around the world.

Posted by rkb 2004-07-15 12:35:07 PM|| 2004-07-15 12:35:07 PM|| Front Page Top

#4 Oil fields may be 'recharging' but surely that can be explained as fluid movements within the oil-bearing pockets. Pump an accessible patch of crude-saturated rock dry, leave it a few years, and it can't be surprising that pressure's built up enough to enable a temporary renewal of extraction.

If crude's a magma product, how come I've never heard of oil seepages associated with volcanoes of any sort?

I admit I say this without any expert knowledge of the subject myself. I'm sure others (e.g. AP) will have much more informed comments to make about this subject...

Posted by Bulldog 2004-07-15 12:55:48 PM|| 2004-07-15 12:55:48 PM|| Front Page Top

#5 ...'dry' should have been in scare quotes, I think.

Posted by Bulldog 2004-07-15 12:58:37 PM|| 2004-07-15 12:58:37 PM|| Front Page Top

#6 But Gold's position is held by a majority of Russian oil scientists

Never mind... I was going to do a cheap shot about Soviet era science in particular the bizzare Stalinist era genetics mogul, which really doesn't have anything to do with this discussion. I'm sorry.

Posted by Shipman 2004-07-15 4:46:49 PM|| 2004-07-15 4:46:49 PM|| Front Page Top

#7 Lysenko. The comment made me think of that also.

OTOH has anyone been following the ConAgra project in Carthage,IL to make oil out of turkey waste - cant feed the stuff to other animals anymore (thank YOU bulldog) and its a pain to dispose of, but it turns out that there are some clever ways of getting net energy out of it.

Posted by Liberalhawk 2004-07-15 4:54:56 PM|| 2004-07-15 4:54:56 PM|| Front Page Top

#8 The energy isn't net LH. There was a shitload *kofi* of corn fired down them gullets. Still, it's good waste disposal, though I'll bet if it wern't for the NIMBY problem a sprayfield would be even better.

Posted by Shipman 2004-07-15 5:27:01 PM|| 2004-07-15 5:27:01 PM|| Front Page Top

#9 #4 Bulldog writes: Oil fields may be 'recharging' but surely that can be explained as fluid movements within the oil-bearing pockets.

The article says: Even more intriguing is evidence that several oil reservoirs around the globe are refilling themselves, such as the Eugene Island reservoir â not from the sides, as would be expected from cocurrent organic reservoirs, but from the bottom up.

My husband's cousin is an oil geologist ... if she's in from the field I'll give her a ring and ask her opinion on all this.

Lysenko was off base, but possibly not as much as you might think BTW. For those who aren't familiar with the name, Lysenko believed that animals could change their bodily shape in response to the environment and then pass those changes to their offspring. We know, of course, about the role of DNA/RNA in inheritance, with the first work of Mendel, and so this sounds ridiculous.

However, the whole book has not yet been written on how genes work. For instance, "junk genetic material" formerly considered to be worthless stuff hanging on the ends of chromosomes now apepars to have important impacts on the work of genes - Scientific American had a big article on this last year, IIRC. A lot of opther work is now being done on the way in which some genes change their function in response to metabolic activity in mammals. And that metabolic activity can affect the fetus in the womb in some cases. For example, there are cases where diet, exercise and stress int he parent changed the color of hair on mouse offspring from what a Mendelian genetic theory would say must be its inherited color. It's a topic I follow casually, as there is some debate within the show dog breeding world about whether certain medical conditions are simply and irrevocably inherited, or whether environment before and after birth might also contribute to or impede the condition's development.

I'm not a new age-y believer in crystals, auras or a disbeliever in the scientific method BTW. Just noting that reality is often more complicated than simple theories .... and that early theories we learn as "givens" in school often are way behind what practicing scientists are discovering.

Posted by rkb 2004-07-15 5:31:32 PM|| 2004-07-15 5:31:32 PM|| Front Page Top

#10 ack ... sorry about the typos above. Preview Is My Friend .....

Posted by rkb 2004-07-15 5:32:30 PM|| 2004-07-15 5:32:30 PM|| Front Page Top

#11 Well, my timing is impeccable. The Wall Street Journal has an article todayhere:

If anyone out there still believes that DNA is destiny and that claims to the contrary are so much bleeding-heart, PC drivel (my favorite is that parents' treatment of their children has no effect on their character, beliefs, behavior or values), neuroscientist Michael Meaney has some rats he'd like you to meet.

Since the 1990s, he and his colleagues at McGill University, Montreal, have been documenting how mother rats affect their offspring (dads don't stick around to raise the kids). Now they have scored what neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky of Stanford University, Palo Alto, Calif., calls "a tour de force": proof that a mother's behavior causes lifelong changes in her offspring's DNA.

"In the nature/nurture debate, people have long suspected that the environment somehow regulates the activity of genes," says Prof. Meaney. "The question has always been, how? It took four years, but we've now shown that maternal care alters the chemistry of the gene."

Posted by rkb 2004-07-15 9:36:35 PM|| 2004-07-15 9:36:35 PM|| Front Page Top

#12 Pump an accessible patch of crude-saturated rock dry, leave it a few years, and it can't be surprising that pressure's built up enough to enable a temporary renewal of extraction.

Actually just the opposite happens sometimes (family's in the business): if you stop pumping a productive well/lease then return later in an attemtp to restart production, you'll often find the field's productivity to have decreased. At least that's true of the very shallow wells we drill in the midwest. One oddity I've seen personally: my dad still pumps a field first drilled by my grandfather during WW II. The production numbers have always been very low (fraction of a bbl/day/well) but it's still producing as much now as it did a half century ago and we're decades beyond the point at which the geologists said it would play out based on the known local producing formations. Not support for the deep oil proposition but an interesting oddity.

Posted by AzCat 2004-07-15 11:41:31 PM|| 2004-07-15 11:41:31 PM|| Front Page Top

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