From: Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
Date: Wed Dec 19 2001 - 12:22:50 MST
On Wed, Dec 19, 2001 at 01:03:54PM -0500, Mike Lorrey wrote:
> d1@neptune>
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> Technotranscendence wrote:
> >
> > On Tuesday, December 18, 2001 11:52 AM Mike Lorrey mlorrey@datamann.com
> > wrote:
> > > Furthermore, there does seem to be a degree of replenishment of oil in
> > > older fields. It is theorized that oil is mostly produced by
> > > extremophilic bacteria deep in the ground reacting with geothermal
> > > originated energy. There is a small but significant market for
> > reopening
> > > long abandoned wells to cheaply recover oil at lower production rates
> > > which has refilled the salt domes and sand strata where oil collects
> > as
> > > it percolates up.
> >
> > I've heard this theory before, but I thought it was discredited when no
> > oil was found in places like Sweden. Am I wrong? Any recent [online]
> > references on this?
>
> No references, but the amount of oil in the North Sea should be
> indicative. The lack in Sweden could simply be a phenomenon of the
> particular rock layers/thickness/fault structure.
The drillings in the Siljan region were guided by Gold's model, and
given that the area is an old (360 my) meteor impact crater where there
are abundant cracks into the deep crust with an impassable layer above,
his theory really should predict plentiful oil. Some oily sludge was
found, likely subsurface lithoautotrophic ecosystems, but definitely not
in any commercial quantities and apparently far less than predicted by
his theory. I would consider it a tentative falsification.
As for the North Sea fields, they are in a completely different geology
- sedimentary rocks rather than the granites of the Scandinavian shield.
> Even so, if oil is not being produced at depth all around the world, it
> most certainly will tend to percolate from deeper reserves to more
> shallow reserves over time, such that oil that is currently unreachable
> eventually works its way up to fill previously evacuated salt domes.
What would the transfer time be?
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