Saturday, January 26, 2002
1:20 AM LINK
Jellyfish from the Michigan Sea
Interesting story from Cosmiverse about the mystery of jellyfish fossils in Wisconsin. The fact that they are in Wisconsin is not a mystery (recall the "Michigan Sea" I mentioned earlier). What is a mystery is how a boneless marine animal could be preserved as a fossil. Recall that it is the calcium in the bones and shells that typically becomes the sedimentary rock.
The reason has a lot to do with what I was talking about regarding the lack of decay in certain ocean chemistries.
They believe that a lack of erosion from sea water and
wind, lack of scavengers, and lack of any significant
sediment disturbance by other organisms all played a
major role in preserving the group of jellyfish after they
were caught in the sand.
"They" here refers to
Whitney Hagadorn of Cal Tech and his team.
Just to let you know, however, there's not a great amount of oil in Wisconsin and Michigan (there is some, but not as much as one might expect to find, considering the history). I couldn't tell you exactly why, but one reason might be that the Michigan Sea existed in the Cambrian Era, which was a long time ago, even geologically speaking. Maybe much petroleum formed would have dissipated long ago. Just a semi-educated hunch.
Actually, the fact that there was a shallow sea there once means that the Michigan basin is being continually re-evaluated for petroleum each time new exploratory technology emerges. It would be sort of ironic if they wound up finding oil below Detroit.
According to this site, there are 500,000 petroleum wells in the Michigan Basin.
Here's a working petroleum geologist at Western Michigan Univ., looking for new ways of extracting oil from the Michigan Basin. Evidently the oil reservoirs are typically found in Devonian carbonates, for you geology buffs.
The subtext of this is that the fact that we are looking for oil there at all is an indication of how desperate we are. We are scraping the bottom of the barrel, pardon the pun, by drilling exploratory wells in Michigan. If we still had big, fat oil fields at our disposal, we wouldn't be wringing Devonian carbonates below Michigan for petroleum. But we are. It says a lot about our national predicament.
Friday, January 25, 2002
2:45 PM LINK
Cracking Down
So as far as producing oil source rock goes, we have the following picture:
1. Microorganisms in shallow seas create sedimentary layers.
2. If the sea floor is lacking oxygen, the organic molecules can remain sufficiently intact without decaying completely away, as they normally would.
If these things occur, the rock might eventually produce petroleum. But more has to happen. Specifically, the organic molecules left over from the microorganisms have to be broken down.
That is, the undecayed organic content, in its itself, is not petroleum. The molecules of life (e.g., proteins) are way too large to be decent fuel. They have to be dismantled into the smaller organic pieces, namely the basic hydrocarbons, which are relatively simple combinations of carbn and hydrogen atoms.
Petroleum geologists refer to this process as "cracking" the molecules. They use the same word in reference to what happens underground, as well as what happens in an oil refinery. The net process is the same, the reduction of the elaborate tinker-toy pieces of life into more basic parts.
It is these basic parts that are the hydrocarbon molecules fo petroleum.
How does this cracking proceed underground? There are two main factors: temperature and time. Cracking the organic material into simple hydrocarbons will occur at the right temperature, given the right amount of time.
Thursday, January 24, 2002
10:49 AM LINK
John Love, Colorado Governor
John Arthur Love, former Governor of Colorado in the 1960's, moderate Republican, died this week. He quit the governorship during his third term to become Nixon's energy czar (before there was a Department of Energy), but resigned after six months, over disagreements with Nixon over conservation policy. Here is the N.Y. Times and the Rocky Mountain News
9:00 AM LINK
Irish Humor
The Jasker "self-sustaining energy source" is a pure hoax, by the way. That hasn't keep major news sources from reporting on it, though. It shows you the hunger and anxiety people have over this issue. It taps into those "subterranean currents of opinion" I was talking about, that so many of the world's woes are somehow connected to our energy supply, and how it is distributed.
Good discussion of how the media handles such stories on Slashdot.
Wednesday, January 23, 2002
9:35 PM LINK
2004 Election
The first real salvo was fired against Bush today, by John Kerry of Massachussetts, criticizing Bush's energy policy. It's the issue that makes even rock-hard conservatives squeamish. They seem to feel the subterranean currents of the issue.
The Democrats would be foolish not to beat this issue into the ground. My prediction: they won't.
9:51 AM LINK
No Dead Dinosaurs
Everyone knows that petroleum is a "fossil fuel." There's a popular idea that when you go to the gas station, you are filling up your car with "dead dinosaurs" (like the Sinclair sign).
This is simply not true. Petroleum is not made out of dead dinosaurs, at least as people normally think of dinosaurs. Nor is petroleum composed of decayed swamps in which dinosaurs lived. Land-based vegetation is not the source of petroleum (actually fresh-water swamps and peat bogs are the source of coal).
Instead, as I mentioned, petroleum is formed by the sedimentation at the bottom of shallow seas that typicaly existed between one hundred to two hundred million years ago.
Under the right conditions of climate and water chemistry, such a sea, like ones today, might be teeming with microorganisms. When these microorganisms die, the remains fall to the bottom of the sea, where they accumulate.
LIkewise, the microorganisms could be digested, and the fecal matter winds up accumulating at the bottom of the sea as well.
Over the millennia, the layers of decayed microorganisms at the bottom of the sea form layers of rock. This is exactly how sedimentary rock forms.
If you know anything about limestone, you've probably heard that it forms in this way. Some forms of limestone, called fossiliferous limestone, contain visible fossils of marine life. But normally limestone is not oil source rock, for reasons I will explain.
Chemically speaking, limestone is basically calcium carbonate, formed by the mineral calcium in the hard skeleton or shell part of the microorganism, just as in your bones and teeth.
Normally, when a microorganism dies, the oxygen in the sea water begins eating away the living issue, breaking down the organic carbon-based molecules. This is normal process of decay. Eventually all that is left are the bones--the calcium. That's limestone, in a nutshell.
Here is a good link about how limestone forms, specifically about the Niagara Escarpment and the "Michigan Sea."
But in some cases, the decay process does not proceed. If the water at the bottom of the sea floor does not contain enough oxygen, then the microorganisms will not decay completely. Decay of tissues is like fire, a form of "burning," and like fire it will "go out" without sufficient oxygen. In an environment lacking oxygen, living tissues are preserved much longer, and thus organic molecules do not break down. Instead they accumulate in the rock layer, and become part of the sediment.
This is exactly how oil source rock forms---the same process that creates limestone at the bottom of the sea, but tweaked for special conditions of water chemistry. Specifically the water at the sea bottom must be oxygen-poor, which allows the organic molecules to remain somewhat intact as the rock forms. As I mentioned before, if the concentration of organic molecules is high enough, the rock is a candidate for producing oil.
At this point, the sediment will not necessarily become oil source rock. Other conditions have to be satisfied, but this is how it starts. It's one of the reasons why oil deposits are fairly rare, all in all. Certain specific conditions have to satisfied, even when there is plenty of organic life in the water.
What about this lack of oxygen that retards the decay of microorganisms? This can occur given certain conditions about how water flows in and out of sea. Right now in the Black Sea, it has been reported that the bottom is very oxygen-poor, and thus ships from classical times that sunk there are still perserved, some with their sails. Normally the oxygen in water would have eaten away the timbers and cloth long ago, but without oxygen, the decay virtually halts.
Note: The Robert Frost poem link above was suggested by Deffeyes, actually:
To warm the frozen swamp as best it could
With the slow smokeless burning of decay
from the
The Wood-Pile (1914).
Tuesday, January 22, 2002
8:40 PM LINK
World Oil Transit Chokepoints
Gotta love this kind of stuff, from the EIA. Like a giant game of Risk, with all the marbles at stake:
The following presents information on major world oil transit centers. Over 30 million barrels per day (bbl/d) pass through
the relatively narrow shipping lanes and pipelines discussed below. These routes are known as chokepoints due to their
potential for closure. Disruption of oil flows through any of these export routes could have a significant impact on world oil
prices.
Here's my summary of it. The figures are based on 2000 estimates in millions of barrels per day. Also shown are the major markets that would be affected by closure:
| Straits of Hormuz | 15.5 | Japan,U.S.,w.Europe |
| Strait of Malacca | 10.3 | Japan,China,S.Korea |
| Bab el-Mandab (Red Sea entrance) | 3.3 | Europe. |
| Suez Canal/Sumed Pipleline | 3.1 | Europe |
| Bosporus | 1.6 | Europe |
| Russian Pipelines/Ports | 1.2 | Europe |
| Panama Canal/Pipeline | 0.5 | U.S. |
12:33 PM LINK
The War of Faiths in Energy Technology
The crux of the oil vs. alternative fuel debate hinges on faith in technology. It is a matter of which new technologies we pursue.
We can vigorously pursue alternative fuel technologies. In the case of oil dependence, this means fuels for transportation, since our transportation depends almost exclusively on petroleum right now. Even if we were to heat every home in North America with solar power, we would still need to address the issue of how to move people and goods from one point to another.
On the other hand, we can also pursue more advanced technolgoies for the extraction of petroleum. Even those advocating continued reliance on oil as our primary transportation fuel admit that we must pursue these technologies if we are to continue using petroleum as our primary fuel for transportation. Without these advances, the optimistic scenarios about growth in oil production to keep up with demand do not work at all.
The counter argument against this last claim, and the one underlying most claims that oil production will be declining no matter what new petroleum extraction technologies we pursue, is that these new extraction technologies will have little effect on the overall supply of petroleum, that they will not discover vast new reserves (which simply don't exist). Mostly what they will do is allow us to extract existing reserves at a faster rate.
So in essence, it is a battle of faiths in technology. Both sides have put their faith in technological advances. The petroleum advocates have claimed this repeatedly about those advocating alternative fuels, but they are just as dependent on faith of new technology for their scenario to play out they way they envisage.
The Bush energy policy released last year might well have been labeled: "new technology will save us by finding oil we don't know about yet."
The question is: are they right or wrong?
Monday, January 21, 2002
4:37 PM LINK
The Real Role of Technology
This excellent article by Roger Blanchard of Northern Kentucky University explores in depth the issue of the impact of new technology in the exploration of North Sea reserves. The North Sea turns out to be an excellent case study on the effects of new technology, since it is the site of the deployment of many cutting edge methods for finding oil fields.
He argues that the main role of better technology is not to find lots of new oil, but to deplete proven reserves at a faster rate.
There's an excellent graph from his article, basically showing the diminishing returns from drilling more holes.
The increase in Norwegian production in the last few years has come mainly from smaller new fields with short lifespans. Most of the large fields discovered early on are in decline. Not only that, they are in rapid decline, probably aided by the application of new methods of extraction, according to Blanchard.
So the question to ask about new technology in the oil business is: will we really find more, or will we simply get it out faster?
3:33 PM LINK
Addicted to Oil
Interesting article from last month's Economist blasting Bush's energy policy before and after Sept. 11. Discusses Saudi Arabia as the "swing producer" that sets prices, even for our domestic crude. Brought up some of the same issues I did in Fake Energy Independence. The article whisically suggests it would take a naval blockade of our own shores to actually acheive "energy independence" through drilling only our own oil.
There's a great companion article here from the same issue, called "Dangerous Addiction," predicting a bleak future of increased dependence on Middle East crude through the policty of "benign dependence." The article accepts the premise that world production will keep climbing, but that this will mean ever-increasing dependence on Saudi Arabia, because it will produce oil ever-more cheaply compared to other countries.
The dramatic wave of non-OPEC discoveries in the
1960s and 1970s in the North Sea, Alaska and
other places has helped to counterbalance OPEC's
pricing power. But these big fields are about to
enter a phase of rapid decline. Part of the
explanation is simple old age. In the North Sea,
for example, most large fields are now 70-90%
depleted. And the dramatic techniques that have
allowed big oil companies to improve oil-recovery
rates have ended up draining fields all the
faster.
There is a very interesting and
extremely crucial point elaborated there: the role of new technology to find new reserves. Those who predict an ever-burgeoning supply of petroleum throughout the next century inevitably rely on this last point,
that increases in technology will allow ever greater discovery of new reserves. It's a central point in Bush's energy policy.
The counterargument is that the great technological leaps for finding oil are in the past, and their greatest effect has been the depletion of the world's reserves at an ever-faster rate.
Whether or not you believe oil production will begin declining within the next decade depends largely on just how much "new technology" is going to find new oil. The Department of Energy thinks it will.
1:39 PM LINK
Great Britain's Great Fortune
One ironic note about the Torrey Canyon is that within a decade, Great Britain would no longer be importing oil at all, but exporting it.
This is due to discovery of the North Sea oil fields during the 1960's, which started producing during the 1970's. It basically saved the United Kingdom from financial ruin. During the 1960's, there were debates in England about how to face the inevitable decline of the U.K. into Third World economic status. Within a decade, these debates were moot. It's important to keep this fact in mind when discussing the rise of Thatcherism. I don't think you can separate the two phenomena.
Another interesting fact about the North Sea oil fields is that the location of the oil fields (see map below) is nearly midway between Scotland and Norway, allowing for an easy sharing of the concession of oil drilling between the two countries (the fact that the oil is in Scotland is a fact not lost upon the Scottish Independence Party).
The North Sea is an example of how oil reserves can be found in a current or former shallow sea, as I indicated earlier. The North Sea sits on the continental shelf of Europe, not out in the open Atlantic.
Here's the kicker: North Sea production has already peaked and begun to decline.
The North Sea is now at peak, with the UK being off 7% in 2000 and 16% off October to October, meaning that production is set to fall by one-half in ten years...." (Peak Oil: a Turning for Mankind, April 2001)
I found the above quote here, a sporadically-updated site just about Hubbert's Peak. There's a good graph of production trends in the U.K. there. The fattest times for U.K. oil are in the past. Some hard choices lie ahead, and the U.K. may become a net importer in the very near future again. No one quite knows what's going to happen.
Here's a good fact sheet on the North Sea oil fields published by the U.S. Department of Energy. It mentions the following:
(1). The North Sea fields are "mature." Although production has not declined substantially yet, new exploration by the U.K. and Norway
has dropped to its lowest level since the 1960's.
(2). Total North Sea crude production reached a peak of 6 million barrels a day in 2000. That's about 4-5 VLCC loads per day. Production declined in 2001, as mentioned above.
(3). The cost of production of North Sea oil is high. This is primarily because it is off-shore, in an inhospitable climate. This is an important point, that recovery of off-shore oil is fairly expensive. The geopolitical stability of northern Europe allows recovery of the oil at a profit. If the North Sea weren't so peaceful, it might not be economical to drill for oil. It's important to keep this in mind when discussing possible drilling in the South China Sea.
Note: when researching this piece, I found lots of links to maps of the North Sea oil concessions that you can buy in poster form. I discovered something:
Oil maps are expensive. Most
suppliers want about two hundred bucks a pop for their maps. Black gold indeed.
