Giving the oil shortage the slip...
Interesting find in Mexico.
From
WorldNet Daily:
Massive oil field found under Gulf
Reserves south of New Orleans could rival North Slope, boosting U.S. supplies by 50%
Chevron and two oil exploration companies announced the discovery of a giant oil reserve in the Gulf of Mexico that could boost the nation's supplies by as much as 50 percent and provide compelling evidence oil is a plentiful deep-earth product made naturally on a continuous basis.
Known as the Jack Field, the reserve – some 270 miles southwest of New Orleans – is estimated to hold as much as 15 billion barrels of oil.
Authors Jerome R. Corsi and Craig R. Smith say the giant find validates the key thesis of their book, "Black Gold Stranglehold: The Myth of Scarcity and the Politics of Oil," that oil did not come from the remains of ancient plant and animal life but is made naturally by the Earth.
"We have always rejected the theories that oil and natural gas are biological products," Corsi told WND. "Chevron's find in the Gulf of Mexico validates our argument that the Gulf is a huge resource for finding oil and natural gas."
The Wall Street Journal reports today the find could boost the nation's current reserves of 29.3 billion barrels by as much as 50 percent.
Chevron discovered the field by drilling the deepest to date in the Gulf of Mexico, down 28,175 feet in waters nearly 7,000 feet deep, some seven miles below the surface of the Earth.
The second biggest source of oil in the world is Mexico's giant Cantarell field in the Gulf of Mexico near the Yucatan Peninsula. It was discovered in 1976, supposedly after a fisherman named Cantarell reported an oil seep in Campeche Bay.
In March, Mexico announced the discovery of a field that could be larger than Cantarell, the Noxal field in the Gulf of Mexico off Veracruz.
In "Black Gold Stranglehold," Corsi and Smith argued the theory developed in the Soviet Union in the 1950s by Prof. Nikolai Kudryavtsev that oil is a deep-earth, abiotic product. The theory, the authors wrote, "rejected the contention that oil was formed from the remains of ancient plant and animal life that died millions of years ago. According to Kudryavtsev, oil had nothing to do with the unproved concept of a boggy primeval forest rotting into petroleum. The Soviet scientist ridiculed the idea that an ancient primeval morass of plant and animal remains was covered by sedimentary deposits over millions of years, compressed by millions of more years of heat and pressure."
And yet another reason to thank Jimmah Carter:
Earlier this year, Cuba announced plans to hire the communist Chinese to drill for oil some 45 miles off the shores of Florida. This move was made possible by the 1977 agreement under President Jimmy Carter that created for Cuba an "Exclusive Economic Zone" extending from the country's western tip to the north, virtually to Key West, Fla.
Whatever happened to our 200-mile territorial limit. Granted Cuba is closer than 200 miles but sheesh -- Jimmah gave away the farm here in a foolishly ignorant attempt at appeasement. He could have pushed for a
quid pro quo and gotten human rights reforms and better medical care for the Cuban citizens but nooooo -- just give it away.
Finally, there is some vindication for
Dr. Thomas Gold who's landmark 1992 paper:
The Deep Hot Biosphere got people re-thinking the origins of petroleum.
From Dr. Gold: "
Hydrocarbons are not biology reworked by geology (as the traditional view would hold) but rather geology reworked by biology"
I have just this one question for those who would debate this idea.
Given that there is a large oil deposit found underneath 7,000 feet of seawater and another 28K feet of earth, where did the vegetable matter come from that made this deposit.
The current thought is that the vegetable matter came from the Carboniferous period, specifically the later Pennsylvanian half.
Certainly a lot of the coal beds come from this period but oil?
You can argue that plankton and marine algae died and were compressed and incubated much like the terrestrial coal precursors but there was no known geological activity that could bury this deposit to the five mile depth that it is sitting at today.
I am thinking that the early geologists looked at the similarities between coal and oil and conflated the two origins. We need to separate the two and re-think a bit...
Posted by DaveH at September 5, 2006 9:39 PM