Not Another Fracking Thread

That's a good article...............but just a teaser.

I'll have to read some more on that theory.

Do you know of any evidence that exists, that oil is continually being formed?

Thanks.

I thought about just doing my own google search, but it's more fun on here.

Despite some of the comments here, a lot of this stuff is new information.

Scientists still don't seem to know exactly how much oil there is..................or even exactly how it got there.

The numbers that are coming out, in regard to US oil and natural gas, are becoming staggering. And it's just the tip of the iceberg.

Try only 1500 to 2000 feet in the Bradford Oil Field - and yes - it is still producing. See the well at McDonalds in Bradford, PA sometime - it is over 100 years old.

I seem to recall from my old textbooks that the well at Titusville was only about 65 feet deep.

Yeah - the old Colonel got very lucky. He was chasing a reported surface seepage. If I remember correctly, what he hit was very atypical. The majority of the wells around there are considerably deeper, judging by the remaining pump jacks.

Around Bradford (80 miles from Titusville)the Second Sand, which is the big one there, is at the depths I mentioned, depending if you're in the valley or up on the top on the plains around the airport. The famous 1930's blow out on Music Mountain was at 1629'.

It didn't seep anywhere. That's where the plants and animals from the Paleozoic era ended up after years and years of erosion and deposition.

Geologic eras encompass millions and millions of years. Things get buried. Mountains rise and are eroded away. Grand Canyons are made. Rocks are eroded by the wind and rain over millions of years.

Grasshopper, think millions and millions and millions of years.

I'm probably confused because I have to use my imagination.

What was it like, living through all of that upheaval?

I'd don't remember. I was just a raindrop back then.

In many cases, and places, there was no upheaval. Just billions of years of dust raining down from tiny meteors that bombard the Earth constantly, from volcanoes that blew dust and rock blown into the atmosphere that then fell to earth, from the sand and dust sent aloft by wind as it eroded the mountains, the ash from the burning of prairies and forests, rock scraped and transported by the great glaciers that ebbed and flowed over the eons, rivers that washed rock and minerals and vegetable matter down from the mountians and then overflowed their banks, and at times by the seas as they rose and fell over the eons flooding the interiors of the continents depositing millions of tons of dead sea creatures and their excrement. All slowly burying the yet-still-more distant past.

Deep geologic time is amazing to contemplate.

You were there, too?

Somedays I feel as old as dirt.

in the California desert they've found fish fossils from millions of years ago when the place was a seabed!

Well, just in case the Big One hits, I'm buying up all the Nevada beachfront property I can find. :)

Coincidentally, I just saw this report earlier today. The NY State Health Department finished a study over a year ago into fracking in NY State. The report says that, when done using the regulations already in place, fracking is safe.

Apparently an 'insider' got tired of the Health Dept sitting on the report, so the insider 'leaked' it.

http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2013/01/05/fracking-safe-in-ny-state-says-leaked-report/

That's interesting.

It's coming to NC too. I'm sure that the people that wrote the report, tried to find something dangerous.

Is this a wind-up? Jeez, mate - are you coming out as a creationist? Oh, crap!!!

I have gotten the impression that a large part of the rethinking of things is due to vast improvements in seismic mapping techniques and equipment. 40 years ago there was a lot of personal interpretation in how a sounding or group of them was made and read.

Now today we have active 3D mapping systems that can literally follow a drilling rigs bit at 3 - 5 feet of resolution two miles down and two miles out!

I had the opportunity to see one companies system two summers ago and it very cool tech to say the least.

They set up a grid covering several miles with cables and special sensors so that they can take large area readings in real time with high precision digital recording systems which can produce highly accurate 3D maps in real time of both underground and surface vibrations produced both naturally and by man made actions.

From that they can create 3D maps covering each layer in the geological formations going incredibly deep and with high accuracy as to what exactly they are potentially looking at.

Yeah. I took that. You probably had the same class.................

Oil comes from decaying plants and animals, forms in underground reservoirs, and that there is a finite supply.

Finding out that the entire US is covered up with oil and natural gas, is relatively new info. As well as the idea that it is continually being formed.

If we are talk the vast store of shale oil. It's not new info they have known about for decades. It's that the cost of getting to it wasn't profitable at the time. Plus some of the newer technology that they found along the way has help to reduce that cost.

From my years in coal -coke research I remember the belief at that time was that coal, which typically is found at much shallower depths was known by petrographic analysis to be decaying plant matter. You could see the plant structure under a microscope. They believed then that oil was caused strictly from decaying animal matter as it did not have any structure under the scopes.

3-4k feet isn't deep at all. Fairly shallow, actually, for oil. One well-known process which can carry organic matter deep underground is subduction - one tektonic plate slipping under another. What may have begun as organic sediment a in shallow sea ends up five-eight miles below the surface. If you really want to bake your noodle, consider that diamonds - pure carbon - are formed 150-200 miles below the surface and you get some idea how deep this stuff can dive.

If it seeped anywhere, oil seeped upward until it was trapped by an impermeable layer.

Depth doesn't have much to do with calling anything 'fossil' - there are fossil plants and sea creatures on Mount Everest. The word 'fossil' derives from 'dug up', so if I was being very annoying I'd argue that nuclear fuel is 'fossil fuel' ().

Peat bogs are usually above sea level (!), and the peat can be converted to oil by heating and collecting the vapours. In an oilfield nature has done the treatment job with a bit of pressure. Take a nice swamp, full of rotting whatever, throw in a nice storm to bury it in sand. Repeat a few times. Maybe have some climate change to cover the whole lot in wind blown dust. etc etc. I'm sure you get the general idea from what others have said.

Around here the abiotic theory is slowly coming into question as being plausible again as more and more geology reports from the mapping crews working around the state keep reviewing their data going deeper and deeper around here.

Three years ago the reports were that we had around 500 billion barrels of oil in the ND oil fields but now that they started looking deeper and wider the latest rumors are now putting us at unofficially 1 - 1.5 trillion barrels in the whole mid west region of the country and lower mid Canadian regions of the North American continent!

More oil fields and wider spread fields plus these continual and regular seismic mapping anomalies around 7 or so miles down keep suggesting that there may in fact be a super formation (~100 trillion Bbl's+) feeding a large percentage of what they are presently mapping and drilling into now at the shallower 1.8 -2.2 mile plus or minus formation depths.

Officially its still speculation of course but the people doing the actual mapping sure seem convinced that there may be something far bigger than imaginable down there.

Anyone got $50 million or so they will lend me to buy my own rig and take a few super deep drilling samples from 7 - 8 miles down?

Wow!!!

I heard a little blurb on one of the radio shows the the other day, that we might have enough oil in the US to last 1000 years, at current use levels.

Worked as a roughneck in my younger days. All the wells drilled were in West Texas(Midland/Odessa). A shallow well is 4500- 5500 feet. Many are drilled there at 7000- 9000 feet.

Work one rig north of Monahans that was going down 17000 feet. Rowan brought a standard derrick in off the golf to do that.

I guess I should rephrase my OP, or clear up where I was coming from...........

I'm fairly familiar with Geo 101, tectonic plate movement, etc. Obviously, the article's numbers of 3000-4000 feet below the surface were low.

They are finding oil at incredibly deep depths; all over the place too.

Now, as far as I know, the surface of the earth has always been pretty much the surface. There is surface evidence of events that took place millions of years ago.

If we accept the idea that oil comes from decayed plant and animal matter, would it not indicate that at some point, the surface was up to 10,000 feet or more under us, and that it was teeming with life?

And yet, fossils that are millions of years old are found fairly near the current surface.

Does that make sense?

Of course, it makes sense. The rate of sedimentation, and the resulting thicknesses, vary a lot.

That does not necessarily rule out some continuous mineral process of producing oil, which might be a beneficial finding, even if mostly speculation at present.

what the frac?

I worked in a potash mine in Saskatchewan Canada where we were 1 KM underground which by the way is not that deep by nine standards. The potash was result of ancient seas evaporating leaving behind the salts. The layer is 10-15 feet thick with another layer of salt on top forming the back of the mine or roof. Imagine all the dust and sediment that it took to cover it 1 km thick. One question I had was why were there no fossils found during mining. Incidentally you could drive 40 km from shaft to the work area. My job only took me 10 - 15 km where I serviced the boring machines. Great education and I enjoyed every minute of it after I got over the idea of being that deep for the first time in my life.

One question I had was why were there no fossils found during mining

Best I can think of is to compare that ancient ocean to the Dead Sea. Not much life going on within it's salty waters. The salt deposits resulted from drying up and increasing salinity over a long time, so anything that could do so moved away (or could never live there in the first place). To get that thickness of salt, and at that depth must have taken a staggering amount of time, and some pretty hostile conditions. Boulby Potash mine in the UK has thicker deposits and at greater depth - the stats are similar to both in most places I can think of.

"One question I had was why were there no fossils found during mining."

I remembered seeing leaf or fern shapes on some soft coal so I searched and found this underground forest.

That's cool!!

And it ties right into my OP.

So here we have a fossilized forest at 250-800 feet deep, that is 307 million years old.

We are also extracting fossil fuels from 20,000 feet, and deeper. Assuming that fossil fuel was also made from previously living stuff, it would make that previously living stuff, really, really old, and covered up with a heck of a lot of dirt and rock.

....................or, it would lend itself to support abiogenic theory; which had been dismissed.

Current depth is no real indicator on what depths the animal/plant matter have been to in the millions of years that oil/coal takes to form. Movement of tectonic plates causes warping of the surface - the Himalayas are currently the highest mountains in the world, but have ben produced by the pushing together of plates relatively recently (Precambrian) - and are still rising. This continual, if very slow, movement causes some parts to dip and others to rise. Lewisian Gneiss was sedimentary rock before animals evolved, and has at some time been 40km below the surface in order to achieve the temperatures and pressures required to fuse it together.

Previous comments about fossil fuels continually being made are correct only to the degree that the same forces of nature are in operation. Man likes to keep things clean, use timber for other purposes, eat the fish and other animals which previously would have been around in much greater abundance, so the volumes of oil, coal, etc starting to be produced now will be much less than in the millions of years before man.

the whole fracking argument had settled down then Kram had to stir the pot again

Hey! I said it's not another fracking thread.

More like questioning the idea of fossil fuels being strictly formed by organic material.....................paricularly at the depths that fracking is taking place.

Plate tectonics would explain how organic material ended up thousands of feet underground, but I would think that it would be along the edges, and be found primarily along convergent boundaries.

One would think that the surface on the interior of the plates would remain relatively stable.................even after millions of years.

This whole area is due to be fracked in the near future. Illinois has some oil, but a lot of coal, and it looks like coal will be out of business soon, but natural gas will be a big boon to our economy.

Thanks for the link, I added it to my story links, Part Two:

Natural gas is the future of energy. It is replacing dirty old coal plants, and dangerous expensive nuclear plants. It will fuel cars, vans, buses, locomotives, aircraft, ships, tractors, air conditioners, engines of all kinds. It costs far less. It will help keep us out of more useless wars, where we shed our blood and money. It is used to make many products. It lowers CO2 emissions. Over 4,000 natural gas story links on my free blog. An annotated bibliography of live links, updated daily. The worldwide picture of natural gas.
ronwagnersrants.blogspot.com

To get an idea of how the earth's surface moves, look at some of the oldest rocks on the planet - so old that no fossils are found in them.

This also ties into my OP.

These rocks that contain no traces of fossils are found right on the surface; and yet, thousands of feet under them.................fossil fuel.

http://www.scotsman.com/scotland-on-sunday/scotland/fracking-for-gas-given-the-green-light-1-1950654

It seems to me, that in order for this to make sense, the entire surface of the earth, (when looked at over hundreds of millions of years), would have to be almost fluid.....................much like the agitator in a wash machine pulls clothes from the top to the bottom, and pushes them from bottom to top.

If you were to speed up the process, say 1 frame every 100 years, and snap photos of the surface of the earth then lump them together to make a movie, it would probably look pretty liquid.

The key here is the time. 1 million years is a very long time. So long that it's hard for our puny little brains to wrap around the concept. A lot can happen in a million years. 100 times more can happen in 100 million. Species came and went. Oceans came and went, plains, forests and deserts as well.

It seems to me, that in order for this to make sense, the entire surface of the earth, (when looked at over hundreds of millions of years), would have to be almost fluid

It is. Viscous/elastic/plastic - take any combination you want and it's used in modelling rock behaviour.

Alright then. Although I'm not sure if I would consider a computer model that came out of China in 2008, Geo 101.

A fluid surface, (with complete redistribution of material from top to bottom, and running miles deep), would explain the presence of the organic material necessary for fossil fuels developing so far under the ground.

That type of model is neither new or Chinese. In short, rock is more complex than the rigid and brittle stuff that some people might think it to be. It's not all that different to silly-putty in many ways.

There is no shortage of views on abiotic theory.

An introductory course in Geology would be in order here, but at the moment my time is limited.

Why? For the same reasons that marine fossils, remains of organisms that once lived in the ocean, can be found on the highest mountain summits in the Alps, and Himalayas. Our crust is very dynamic.

There seem to be others that simply need an introductory course in Geology. I suppose they could just sign up for CR4, and be told of their ignorance............

http://rense.com/general54/moreevi.htm

Credit to kevinm, for pointing out Thomas Gold.

I'm taking 2 courses in the Fall, spelling 101, typing 101, and considering spell checker 101....I'm in need

I hear ya!

This is an interesting piece:

http://rense.com/general63/refil.htm

After 60 years in the Geological business the most important thing I have learned is "observe" "think", then decide- sadly much of the geologic info we are fed is theories or views of certain Scientists who have their own specific ax to grind- even if that ax is self promotion- we have not even scratched the surface on knowledge of what the earth did since the big bang, and we will be learning for centuries- Many times in the field I found the written work on that area did not conform with what I saw- so I have learned to keep an open mind- evaluate others views, then decide- and even then the decision may be open to variation- have fun because this is a great forum for opening the mind

all so true. a "fact" isn't always the last word!!

If you think about the formation of diamonds, a pure carbon compound, and the depth at which the Kimberlite fields extend, greater than 150 km deep, you will realize that there is a lot of carbon found at very deep depths. It is thought that this carbon was part of the accretion material that formed the earth some 4.5 billion plus years ago. The hydrocarbons are evident in astronomical gases such as the horses head. It is the same star material that forms the planets. The carbon is thought to layer in the accretion process at depths of 400 kms or thereabouts. It would thus be a logical extension to believe that some of this primordial material will exist today. Is this then the source of abiogenic carbon oils? The literature will cite some isotopic evidence and the use of helium entrapped. It is an interesting subject and thanks for posting Kramarat. I tend to also believe the paleontologists are correct in describing fossil fuels but at the same time abiogenic carbon also can exist. Maybe we should study astronomy 101.

So what we have is diamonds deep in the ground, reverting back to carbon/graphite, then turning to oil which forms/replenishes oil fields ? I can't refute the hypothetical possibility, but I haven't seen any evidence. Unless I missed something, oil/tar recovered from those deep boreholes was found to be contamination from the drilling.

If oil did exist at extreme depth, then we have to consider the energy equation - how many barrels of oil used in recovering each barrel of oil. Being a skeptic, I don't think we'll have to worry about that in the case of theses supposed deep oil reserves.

I agree, this thread is far more interesting than first meets the eye. You raise another interesting topic, kevinm, - the need/benefit of taking an interest in seemingly unrelated fields of study.

There are many articles on the Russian-Ukraine theory of oil. If you read enough from both sides (Abiotic/abiogenic and biogenic) you will note that each side has ardent adherents that claims the other as bogus science. If the RU theory is correct it would mean peak oil is a myth. Also I suspect it would be a real nightmare for the green movement. I believe both sources are possible and is likely. It is hard to think of the formation of the solar system not incorporating vast amounts of the gaseous hydrocarbon. The existing western standards would also not like to admit there is no shortage and will be no shortage as it may affect prices.

I remember Gold having to answer the losses of lubricant oil but I thought he answered it at the time. I have not got a copy of his book handy, so I cannot review it now. I think he died believing he was correct. Alas, another dispute.

I had not thought of the carbon reverting backwards but rather a diamond forming from the primordial carbon under pressure. That is not to say diamonds could not revert if the correct conditions existed. Very hard to prove but your referenced article explains the difficulty. Carbonado (Brazil and Africa) is a type of diamond thought to have been transported to the earth via a meteor. It does point out that if a diamond can form in outer space from astrological forces, why not on earth? All I can say is keep an open mind just like a parachute.

All I can say is keep an open mind just like a parachute.

That's a neat expression.

I'm not sure how much further this thread can develop, but I'll keep an eye open for any related info.

All geologists agree that the surface of the earth has shifted over the years and that it continues to shift. This theory is based on examining the makeup of the earth.

Over the past few decades micro changes on the earth's surface such as ocean levels and temperatures have been observed. It seems logical to me if big (macro) changes happen over long periods of time that small (micro) changes will occur over short periods of time.

Yet there is a community of environmentalists which are alarmed that changes are being observed.

This question looks to be anything but settled. Leave it to me to stumble into something that looks even more contentious than the fracking question.

This covers Geo 101, and why it doesn't really fit anymore. Ignore the political crap.

http://joer4x4.hubpages.com/hub/Peak-Oil-or-Nonsense

Good reasons to believe the abiotic theory:

HYDROCARBONS ARE PRESENT IN OUTER SPACE

• TITAN EXHIBITS MASSIVE PRESENCE OF METHANE ON ITS SURFACE

• METHANE IS A MAJOR COMPONENT IN JUPITER, SATURN, AND NEPTUNE

• HYDROCARBONS ARE PRESENT IN METEORS, ASTEROIDS, AND COMETS

• THE QUANTITY OF HYDROCARBONS IN THE INNER SOLAR SYSTEM EXCEEDS ALL THE KNOWN PETROLEUM AND COAL SOURCES ON EARTH

• IGNEOUS ROCKS-CREATED BY THE SOLIDIFICATION OF MAGMA HOSTS PETROLEUM RESERVOIRS IN MANY MAJOR HYDROCARBON PROVINCES

• MOLECULES TAKEN AS PROOF OF BIOTIC ACTIVITY ARE ALSO PRESENT IN HYDROCARBON FROM OUTER SPACE

• STUDIES SUGGEST THAT THERE MAY BE HUGE METHANE DEPOSITS IN EARTH'S MANTLE, 60 TO 120 MILES DEEP

Welcome aboard. All caps are considered to be rude. Making them bold makes it even more annoying. Links are also helpful.

That said....

I'm becoming a believer. The abiotic theory is making sense to me.

http://www.viewzone.com/abioticoilx.html

So the secret is out. Oil is a renewable energy source. It will drive the environmentalists nuts.

Well, it would still be finite, but there would be a hell of a lot more of it than anyone ever thought. It would also put to death, certain narratives.

http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/09/09/study-warns-of-perilous-oil-crisis/

Finite only to the limit of the amount of carbon found on earth in total. The carbon that is found in the mantle is eventually recycled and released as per the description in your referenced article. Thus I would refer to the hydrocarbon as recycled (subduction of tectonic plates) and renewable.

The amount of carbon from extraterrestrial sources and added to the earth after the solar system was formed plus a billion years would be small compared to the carbon provided during the original formation of the planets and solar system. As stars collapse, the fusion product most abundant is carbon. The core of our sun is fusing to carbon but is large enough to fuse to iron. The supernova are exploding very large stars (100s of times >earth's sun) that form the other heavy metals like uranium along with lots of carbon and other elements. It also means there is a lot of carbon to be found in the gaseous remnants that are the new star makers along with solar systems. It is ludicrous to think the earth's only source of oil is "fossil". IMO

I'm beginning to think that I've stumbled into another massive, politically motivated, agenda driven, cover up.

http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/multimedia/products/pdfs/20060926_CHARM_Waite.pdf

Unless dinosaurs and vegetation once covered Titan.

More here:

https://dco.gl.ciw.edu/sites/dco.gl.ciw.edu/files/Fu%20Sherwood%20Lollar%20et%20al%20GCA%202007.pdf

I learned that oil is plentiful in outer space when I read parts of the very big book Ibid! when I was in High School. If you can find it, it may be worth a look.

I think I'm done looking. I guess I live in a bubble; I had no idea that a war was being waged over this seemingly simple question.

It looks to me like abiotic production is happening. I don't think it means we have an infinite supply, nor that it is replenishing as fast as we use it. I'm having a hard time finding any more scientific links............the rest are looking purely political; from one side or the other.

I'm not ruling out the possiblity that oil is still raining down from space.

An here was me thinking the folks who were flooded were complaining about the CRUD in their houses - and it was CRUDE all along!!

Yep, one persons oil spill is anothers oppurtunity.

In a way, we're playing our own part in the genesis of oil reserves. Pump it up, stash it in strategic reserves, get wiped out, then zip - a few gizellenia late, ET wonders why oil is found at certain depths.

Nobody knows exactly why/how gold deposits formed. We've mined it and stored it at various places on current ground level. When Species 8472 get here, they may think it was all just some geological process. Unless.....they planted us amoeba to do the work.....I'm running to hide behind the sofa.

Of course!

You did check out the NASA link on Titan, right?

Please explain how dinosaurs and vegetation ever lived in such a harsh climate.

NASA morons!!!!!

They all need GEO 101!!!!!

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/cassini/media/cassini-20080213.html

http://www.space.com/4968-titan-oil-earth.html

OT?

From the NASA link:

Cassini has mapped about 20 percent of Titan's surface with radar. Several hundred lakes and seas have been observed, with each of several dozen estimated to contain more hydrocarbon liquid than Earth's oil and gas reserves. The dark dunes that run along the equator contain a volume of organics several hundred times larger than Earth's coal reserves.

Got it. Couldn't ever take place on earth.

Guess I opened another can-O-worms.

I understand that natural gas makes good rocket fuel, so maybe we can use it for a round trip some day.

This is very interesting!

[1] If the abiotic theory explains the production of hydrocarbons (crude oil and methane) on earth, and

[2] if the abiotic theory explains the production of hydrocarbons on meteors, asteroids, comets and and other planets, then

[3] it stands to reason that the same abiotic process could also be active on the sun which means that the sun is making fuel as quickly as it is burnt.

(Tongue-in-cheek: We need to fund NASA/JPL to design a probe out of unobtainum and wishalloy then send it to the sun so that we can see what is below the fiery surface. Perhaps it would be cheaper to just build another Mars probe and send it at night.)

Funny you should mention NASA. Here's a neat little writing that I dug up, from 1962.

http://adsabs.harvard.edu/full/1962Obs....82..216B

It's interesting; we know for sure that meteors contain organic material and hydrocarbons; we know for sure that the the earth has been pummelled by meteorites over the course of billions of years.................and yet, so many cling to their dead dinosaurs, laughing off any other possibility.

http://news.discovery.com/space/earth-meteorites-gold-metals-110907.html

I don't think it would be too crazy to postulate, that the extinction event that took out the dinosaurs and most other life, ( likely an asteroid impact), created a lot of, (terrestrial), organic matter, (within a very short period of time), that decayed and mixed with abiotic petroleum hydrocarbons, and led us to the erroneous conclusion, that all oil was formed from terrestrial sources.

OK my brain is going to explode. And the linked articles have an enormous amount of additional data on the subject. I would have been fine with the idea of oil and gas being the products of deep long term chemical reactions dating from the early formation of the planet. Yet that very interesting work done on the molecular structural differences of deep long term gases vs surface/fossil formed gases just puts a real monkey wrench in the works. These are absolute structural facts based on what appears to be solid factual chemistry. We must be missing something here, perhaps as simple as how old the earth actually is, or some other geological anomaly not yet discovered. Thanks guys for making me feel small and insignificant again. The humility is very healthy and welcome. Watching us little humans try to figure out massive complex systems started billions of years ago is the very basis of Cosmic Humor. And one of very few true purposes for living that I have been able to believe in.

Relating to the Abiotic theory I have read a number counter arguments against it that if it were true in the Ukraine and other such places why are there not massive piping systems supporting only a few functioning wells?

I thought about that for a while and now that I have had a couple of summers of first hand experience in our local oil fields I think there may be a very simple answer.

If it exists and its seeping upward creating our present fields we tap into now then by my reasoning what better place to put a supper deep Aboitic well in than right in the middle of an existing oil field! No one would even notice plus the infrastructure is already in place to handle large volumes from multiple wells so one very high yield well surrounded by multiple low yield wells would never show up or raise any attention to the uneducated eye.

If the soviets have a number of such theoretical wells I suspect they would be located right in the middle of the existing oil fields hidden in plain site.

Thats where I would hide mine! 100 wells producing 1000 Bbls a day or one well producing 100,000 Bbls a day. Either way the infrastructure is set up to handle 100,000 Bbls a day coming out of a small region and from the surface it all looks normal even if 99 of those wells don't actually produce anything.

At least thats my theory on how Aboitic oil could be real and in play already with no one the wiser.

BTW a large crude oil pipeline carrying 100's of thousands of Bbls a day is only 24 - 36 inch's in diameter and very people actually know the whats and wheres of where those pipes join up or start at and even less could identify one regardless of size when its being installed (unless there is a lot of political stink being raised about it at the time its being buried.)

I know this will bring a visit from the OT fairy; but for anyone interested in the real science:

http://www.pnas.org/content/99/17/10976.full#sec-6

I'm having some trouble here:

We've got this.........

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=titan-found-to-be-rather

http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=5270

And then, this:

Any process that results in the production of methane and its release into the atmosphere can be considered a "source." The two main processes that are responsible for methane production occur as a result of microorganisms anaerobically converting organic compounds into methane.

Methanogenesis, the scientific term for methane production, occurs primarily in anaerobic conditions because of the lack of availability of other oxidants. In these conditions, microscopic organisms called archaea use acetate and hydrogen to break down essential resources in a process called fermentation.

Acetoclastic methanogenesis- certain archaea cleave acetate produced during anaerobic fermentation to yield methane and carbon dioxide.

H₃C-COOH → CH₄ + CO₂

Hydrogenotrophic methanogenesis- archaea oxidize hydrogen with carbon dioxide to yield methane and water.

4H₂ + CO₂ → CH₄ + 2H₂O

While acetoclastic methanogenesis and hydrogenotrophic methanogenesis are the two major source reactions for atmospheric methane, other minor biological methane source reactions also occur.

From here, as well as other sources that attribute the vast amounts of methane on early earth, to microbial action..........for the most part.

Microbial "life" on Titan, is highly unlikely, therefore, it seems equally unlikely that the high concentrations of methane on early earth would have been the primary culprit behind methane production.

http://news.discovery.com/earth/early-earth-atmosphere-120318.html

Zerkle and colleagues attribute the transitions to changes in the rate of methane production by microbes.

Why would microbes be responsible on earth, but not on Titan?

I'm sure you will understand that the two bodies have different surroundings and may have achieved different pressures at some point. Also, the possibility of methane production by any of the suggested methods is possible - and there may be some catalysts which will allow the chemical reactions, or similar reactions producing the same tangible results, which promote the effect in certain areas. If the only requirements were 100km depth & specific primary compounds, then there would be gas or oil fairly evenly under the whole planet.

I would suggest that there is a range of starting points, and a selection of catalysts promoting the chemical changes, and once these are understood oil will be able to be produced as cheaply as industrial diamond.

I think it's coming. This is a fascinating subject.

http://newenergyandfuel.com/http:/newenergyandfuel/com/2012/01/23/natural-gas-will-be-changed-to-oil/

http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2011-04/hydrocarbons-could-form-deep-earth-no-dead-animal-ingredients-study-says

In regard to the mysterious refilling of numerous oil wells; one of the primary arguments against abiotic sources, is that it's far too hot at the earth's mantle to form liquid oil; and furthermore, it would not defy gravity and move upward.

I've got a crazy theory that I haven't heard mentioned...........

We know that it's really hot down there. I'm also assuming a complete lack of oxygen.

Here's my thought.........

When oil wells are depleted, there are voids left behind.

Is it possible that heated hydrocarbons are being cooked out of the rock, moving upward in the form of vapor, and condensing in the cooler zones of the depleted oil wells?

This would work much like creosote formation on the inside of a chimney.

Just a thought.

If you have a 40000 foot well (deepest well drilled) and even if it had filled in with salty water, the pressure at the bottom of the well would be 17,000 psi +/-. However the pressure that is forcing the hydrocarbons upward through minute fractures in rock could be well over 120,000 psi at source formation. If the deep oil well was absent of water and subjected only to atmospheric pressure the pressure difference would be much greater. The pressure in the rock at the bottom of a 40000 foot well will be about double the water pressure inside the well So the pressure difference at 40,000 is still 17000 psi more or less. So you would have movement from an area of high pressure to low pressure and that would be upward. That is not unlike any Artesian water well that forces water from depth upward. There would be no defying of gravity. This rising source of hydrocarbons would fill voids (well storage) and the well itself. One of the problems with drilling deeper is that the temperature is high enough to cause the rock to be fluid and thus the rock collapses/slumps into the well.

All of the links I provided, point to a very strong likelihood that abiotic oil synthesis is happening; and they are all very credible links, including NASA.

I'm pretty satisfied that my original question has been answered. I think it would be ridiculous, (at this point), for anyone to make the claim that oil is being produced as fast, or faster, than we are using it.

I think the abiotic theory is much stronger when it comes to natural gas; we are covered up with it............which is great news. Time to get to work on LNG powered cars.