Friday, March 22, 2002
2:31 PM LINK
Kansas: the End-Game of Oil Production.
Another of my Photoshop creations: a map of the oil and gas fields of Kansas. "Someday the whole world will look like Kansas," writes Deffeyes. Explanation of this quote, plus why petroleum geologists are fascinated by the Bahamas, even there is no petroleum there. Also why 98% of the wells in the Kansas are "stripper wells."
12:37 AM LINK
Chronology of Enr*n involvement in Afghanistan pipeline, with details of Cheney-Halliburton wheelings and dealings. This was sent to me by a friend who works for a U.S. government-owned agency. Here's the text of her accompanying email:
Here's a good account of the history of the strangely corrupt dealings of Bush & Enr*n (Because we are owned by DOE, the justice dept has ordered all our email scanned for the word Enr*n, thus the asterisk.)
12:32 AM LINK
Good backgrounder on Cheney-Halliburton-Iraq connections, in Village Voice last month, second article down.
12:28 AM LINK
Photo Comparison of North and South Polar Regions of Mars. New hypothesis is that the north polar ice cap is water, while the south is frozen carbon dioxide (dry ice).
Thursday, March 21, 2002
1:43 PM LINK
Estimated Oil and Gas Reserves in the Gulf of Mexico. From 1997, a motherlode of information.
The 957 proved oil and gas fields in the federally
regulated part of the Gulf of Mexico contained
original proved reserves estimated to be 13.67 billion
barrels of oil and 158.4 trillion cubic feet of gas.
Remaining proved reserves, as of December 31, 1997,
are estimated to be 3.21 billion barrels of oil and 30.8
trillion cubic feet of gas.
The 51 unproved oil and gas fields studied in the
federally regulated part of the Gulf of Mexico
contained unproved reserves estimated to be 1.03
billion barrels of oil and 3.9 trillion cubic feet of gas.
There are an additional 16 unproved active fields not
included in this estimate. Included are unproved
reserves of 0.08 billion barrels of oil and 2.6 trillion
This 1997 report puts the recoverable crude oil in the Gulf of Mexico at around 5 billion barrels (about a 9-month U.S. supply). More has, and will be found. I've heard estimates as high as 15 billion barrels (2-year U.S. supply) for what might be recovered yet from the Gulf, which is about the same as the high-end estimates for ANWR. Taken together, they are the "bright hope" for the future of oil production in the U.S.
1:24 PM LINK
Fredonia, New York. The upstate town of Fredonia, about fifty miles south of Buffalo along the Lake Erie shore, is where the first U.S. natural gas well was sunk, in 1821, over three decades before the first U.S. crude oil. The Erie Canal region and era was the cradle of the natural gas industry in the U.S. The first natural gas pipelines were made out of wood . One supplied the city of Rochester.
1:04 PM LINK
Methyl Mercaptan is the organic flammable gas that is added in minute quantities to natural gas in order to give it a detectable odor. Methane itself is odorless. Basically, mercaptan is methane with an extra sulphur-hydrogen attachment. The smell comes from the presence of sulphur.
11:23 AM LINK
Good Fact Page About Natural Gas from American Petroleum Institute.
Chemically, natural gas and crude oil are nearly the same thing. The term "petroleum" could rightly imply both natural gas and crude oil.
Underground natural gas is formed when the hydrocarbons (which would have otherwise formed a crude oil deposit) are crushed into too-small molecules, all the way down to methane. This occurs underground when the temperature and pressure is higher than it would be for crude oil formation. Gelogically, this is the only difference between natural gas and petroleum.
You can think of natural gas as the "light component of petroleum."
2:14 AM LINK
Excellent backgrounder on oil formation. Technical but extremely lucid.
"In general, the efficiency of origin, migration, and accumulation processes of hydrocarbons is very poor. e.g. Oil and gas are predominantly derived from decayed vegetables, plants and bacteria. 2% (percent) of the organic matter that is dispersed in the fine grained rocks can becomes petroleum (oil and gas). Approx. 0.5 percent of this then ends up in a commercial reservoir accumulation"
1:25 AM LINK
Estimated potential for sea-level changes, based on various scenarios. A total West Antarctic meltdown would raise sea levels by about 8 meters=25 feet, according to the USGS.
1:21 AM LINK
Map of Ronne and Ross Ice Shelves. Excellent graphic form the USGS. You can see the Larsen shelf as well, up on peninsula. The idea is that the Ronne and Ross shelves buttress the land ice of West Antarctica. If they were to break up, then the land ice might become unstable.
Wednesday, March 20, 2002
9:00 PM LINK
Map of Wilmington Oil Field, Long Beach, Calif.
Discovered in 1932, Wilmington is the once mighty oil field of the Los Angeles Basin. In the history of U.S. oil fields, it is third in size, behind only Prudhoe Bay and the East Texas fields. Of its 2.8 billion barrels, about 90% have been recovered. About 300 million barrels are estimated to remain (15-day U.S. supply).
The field is located on the 13 mile long and 3 mile wide Wilmington Anticline that extends from onshore
San Pedro to offshore Seal Beach and is divided vertically by faults creating separate producing entities called Fault Blocks.
Oil is produced from five major sand intervals ranging in depths from 2,000 feet to 11,000 feet where over two and one-half
billion barrels of oil have been recovered. Oil and Gas are recovered through primary production, secondary water flooding,
and steam flooding. A total of 6,150 wells have been drilled to date.
from
City of Long Beach, Dept. of Oil Properties
8:51 PM LINK
How Oil Drilliing Works. With great cross sectional diagrams of steam-injection well process.
6:34 PM LINK
Graph of Alaska Crude Oil Production (1960-present).
Very little before the pipeline in 1978. Peaked sharply in 1988 at about 2 million barrels per day, then began dropping rapidly. Now down to about 1 million barrels per day (about 5% of U.S. daily demand).
Without ANWR drilling, output is expected to continue its steep decline as the Prudhoe Bay is exhausted. With ANWR, production would possibly show a similar two-decade peak, topping out near the current level of 1 million barrels per day about 15 years from now (about 4% of projected U.S. daily demand).
2:39 AM LINK
Comparison of Larsen Ice Shelf Before and After.
I created the map of the left in Photoshop to highlight the ice shelf, with segments in brown and tan, along the Antarctic Peninsula. The photo on the right was just released by the BAS.
Tuesday, March 19, 2002
11:39 AM LINK
U.S. Oil Consumption by year. From the OTT.
Currently at an all-time high.
Peaked in the 1970's at just over 18 million barrels per day, then fell down to less than 16 million barrels per day in 1982. Has been rising steadily for the last 20 years and was at 19.7 million barrels per day during 2000.
By simple arithmetic, diving 19.7 million barrels per day by the U.S. population of 280 million, gives a per capita daily consumption of about one-fourteenth of a barrel for every U.S. resident. If you live in the U.S., your share of consumption is about three gallons of petroleum per day.
The U.S. Dept. of Energy ("Annual Energy Outlook 2001") predicts a 1.4 percent annual increase in consumption through the year 2020, yielding about a one-third overall increase above current levels, to around 27 million barrels per day.
11:11 AM LINK
Kansas Oil Production by Year (1918-present).
Peak production: in 1957 at just over 120 million barrels per year.
Current production: at about 34 million barrels per year.
(about 94,000 barrels per day, or about 0.5% of U.S. daily demand)
Kansas has the 8th largest production for a U.S. state, about one-twelfth of Texas.
Cumulative produciton since 1918: about 6.6 billion barrels to date (roughly 1 ANWR)
The shape of the production curve is typical for a mature oil province. Notice the "Indian Summer" upward spike in the early 1980's, when prices were inflated. The fields, however, were largely exhausted by that time.
Monday, March 18, 2002
10:04 PM LINK
Map of Larsen Ice Shelf.
According to this article, the Larsen B Ice Shelf in Antarctica is crumbling at accelerating rate and is down to about forty percent of its maximum. The recent breaking off a large piece into the open ocean was described by the article as the largest such event in thirty years. If you search Google for Larsen Ice Shelf, you find a lot of such articles about similar events over the last decade.
The Larsen Ice Shelf is the sea ice along the "pointy" part of Antarctica that sticks up towards South America. The most northerly part of the shelf, Larsen A, broke off completely in 1995 in a 1000-square-mile chunk about 600 feet thick. Larsen B is the next most southerly segment. Both it and Larsen C, farther to south, are undergoing crumbling.
Photos of Larsen B partially breaking up during 1998-1999.
History page about Antarctic ice shelves.
Larsen B Collapse Links
British Antarctic Survey article from 1998 predicting Larsen B was about to reach critical instability.
Paleoenvironmental perspective on ice shelf collapse by two of the big researchers in this field, Ted Scambos of the Univ. of Colorado and Christina Hulbe of Portland State, who got her Ph.D. in 1998 and whose name is everywhere in this field.
Scambos and Hulbe have reported that the melting of the ice shelves is accelerating because of a rise in the average temperature during the Antarctic summer, which results in surface melting, or "ponding." Even though the temperatue in the Antarctic winter is cold enough to refreeze this water, the summer surface melting is enough to lead to an accelerated breakdown of the shelf. It was they who postulated that the shelves were therefore closer to the break-up point than had been previously believed.
Many of the articles from 1998 predict that Larsen B would be gone within two years. It looks like maybe Larsen is hanging on for a few more years than originally predicted, its prognosis is still very bleak.
What does this all mean? The Antarctic ice shelves are like the Arctic Ocean ice cap: they are already afloat. They are, as the name describes, shelves of ice that are attached to the continent and reach out to sea.
The ice shelves are shown on white on this map. The Ross Ice Shelf is the largest such shelf, occupying what would otherwise be an enormous bay on the coast of western Antarctica.
Due to warming sea waters, they shelves have been crumbling steadily in recent decades. Large pieces have been breaking off. It is quite possible they will disappear entirely within several decades.
By itself, this does not mean doom. The crumbling and melting of an ice shelf does not raise the sea levels very much.
According to this page, with cool photos, the Ross Ice Shelf is the "size of France", varies in thickness from 600 to 3000 feet. The cliffs at the edge are about 200 feet high. The ice that sticks above the water would, upon melting, contribute to a rise in sea levels. By itself, this would not be a catastrophe.
The crumbling of the shelves is an established fact at this point.
What is uncertain, and what is much more serious perhaps, is the role that these ice shelves have in acting as buttresses to the land ice of Antarctica, particular the large ice sheet that covers western Antarctica and which is upwards of several miles thick. According to one scenario, the crumbling of the sea-based shelves would leave the land ice cover improperly supported along the continental edge, and the sheet would begin sliding down and crumblilng into the ocean.
The bulk of the Antarctic ice cover, the large mass of eastern Antarctica would not be affected, since it is not fringed by ice shelves, and it is separated from the smaller western sheet by mountains.
Most of the "doomsday" scenarios of ocean-level rise postulate a sudden, complete collapse of the western Antarctic ice sheet. Plunging into the ocean, it would raise sea levels by a volume equal the volume of ice currently above sea level.
Here's a good nice picture of Antarctica, showing the western sheet (the smaller part on the left) and the larger eastern sheet (forming of the bulk of the continent, on the right).
The large bulk of ice that rings the entire continent is seasonal. The ice shelves are the "permanent" sea-borne ice on either side of of the western sheet. You can see the idea behind the collapse theory: imagine that the shelves were to melt away. The ice on the western sheet might not be able to keep from sliding into the sea too.
6:43 PM LINK
Adam asks: "won't the Dutch be f****ed once that ice cap melts?"
In the case of the Arctic Ocean ice cap, which may be doomed as a year-round phenomenon, the answer is: only as far as we all are f***ed.
The reason is that its a floating ice cap. Its melting would not raise the global sea level, at least by any detectable amount. Only the small proportion of the ice that currently sticks above sea level will contribute to the rise, and this will be spread out evenly along the globe. Most of the ice floats underwater and will not contribute to a rise.
By and large, the ice that would contribute to sea level rise is that which currently sits on land, like the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. map here.
11:57 AM LINK
Lease proposals in the Los Padres National Forest.
Stretches from the mountains north of Ventura up through San Luis Obispo County. Southern section mostly inland from U.S. 101, but includes the mountains just outside Santa Barbara. There is a northern coastal section in Monterrey County.
The most significant lease proposal is lease proposals include some small sections on the southernmost most fringe of the forest in Ventura County.
As you see from the map, the largest puddle of oil supposedly lies along the inland "back" of the forest, from northern Ventura County up through San Luis Obispo County.
Probably the puddle is a moderately optimistic guess based on existing wells near that particular edge of the forest.
Estimated total recovery: 84 million barrels (4-day U.S. supply).
Existing wells in the forest currently produce about 1,900 barrels per day. (0.009% of U.S. daily petroleum demand).
10:33 AM LINK
Map of Arctic Ocean ice cap in 2030 as projected by the U.S. Navy. The Navy is planning now for how to deal with having a brand new ocean to patrol within 15-20 years (map is at the bottom of the article, which is another good read from the Anchorage Daily News).
Sunday, March 17, 2002
3:00 PM LINK
Map of Area 151.
Total area: 9000 sq. miles (about 25000 km^2)
Location: due east of a line extending southward from Mobile, Alabama and extending eastward at first about ten miles, but flaring out more the to East as one gets farther out into the Gulf, corssing the Florida-Alabama state line and eventually reaching a point due about 200 miles due of south Penscola and about 250 miles due east of Sarasota.
How much oil, possibly: up to 420 million barrels. (21-day U.S. supply).
Lowdown: Drilling in the Gulf is nothing new. Thousands of wells have been drilled off the coasts of Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama, on the shelf extending from about 10 miles off shore to about 200 miles.
The problem is that the Gulf is now leased to capacity in those Coastal areas.
almost everything west of the Mobile, Alabama has been drilled. Up unitl now, there has been only slight exploration of areas of the Florida coast. This is because Florida has chosen to be a tourist state rather than an oil state, as are her sisters in the Gulf.
The United States claims sovreignty out to 200 miles. But whether or not this applies to the state boundary too, the federal government claims to right to decide what should happen in the coastal areas (probably the state has control only out to twelve miles).
Up until now, there has been no need to drill in the areas near the Florida coast, because there have been plenty of leaseholds availale off the coast of the other Gulf states, which willingly court oil and gas exploration in their coastal vicinities.
But west of Mobile, drilling has been going on for so long now that the leaseholds are saturated. Area 151 is the next slice of the coast eastward, what remains south of Alabama and including the large-scale encursion into Florida waters.
Thus the pressure is Florida to open its coastal areas too.
Result: In July 2001, the Bush Interior Department has granted leaseholds on a subsection of Area 151 that includes about 25 percent of the total area, all of which lies in Alabama waters.
This sub-area that was opened for leasing is estimated to contain about 44 percent of the oil deposits: about 185 million barrels (9-day U.S. supply).
