Oil: The Renewable Resource
It has long since been the conventional wisdom that oil is formed by dead biological material being compressed in a process that takes hundreds of thousands of years. Usually scientific explanations that are intriguing to second graders, like masses of dead Tyrannosaurus Rexes underground, turn out to be inaccurate.
The fact of the matter is that nobody knows for sure where oil comes from. Various theories exist, the most intriguing of which is the Abiotic theory - essentially that there is a biosphere deep underground that generates oil in a renewable fashion.
Clear signs that oil fields are self-renewing are nowhere so apparent as they are at Eugene Island, off the coast of Louisiana. When drilling began in 1979, it was producing its peak output of 15,000 barrels a day. By 1989, this output had waned to only 4000 bpd. Then suddenly, the field began to refill - now producing 13,000 bpd.
It kind of blew me away . . . I believe there is a huge system of oil just migrating [deep underground].
Jean Whelan, a geochemist and senior
researcher from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts.
[M]ost geologists are hard-pressed to explain why the world’s greatest oil pool, the Middle East, has more than doubled its reserves in the past 20 years, despite half a century of intense exploitation and relatively few new discoveries. It would take a pretty big pile of dead dinosaurs and prehistoric plants to account for the estimated 660 billion barrels of oil in the region, notes Norman Hyne, a professor at the University of Tulsa in Oklahoma. “Off-the-wall theories often turn out to be right,” he says.
Further Reading: Oil Supply May Be Greater Than Previously Thought, Book: The Deep Hot Biosphere.
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