5:39 PM LINK
www.CowBoy Bar
By the way, I want to put in a plug for the "World's Only Cowboy Internet Bar" at DIA where I spent an entire afternoon reading about oil rocks while Continental was begging a backup part for our plane from United. It's in the A-Concourse, right in the main part above the train station. If you find yourself in the Denver Airport for any length of time, it's not a bad place to plug in your laptop and throw down a few drinks.
But despite the name, don't look for it at www.cowboybar.com, unless you want to see "Ginger's webcam."
5:09 PM LINK
Spindletop
The memorial to the gushers outside the U.T. Petroleum Engineering building that I mentioned was placed there by the campus chapter of Pi Epsilon Tau, the Petroleum Engineering Honor Society. Unless I'm mistaken, I think the statue contains part of the rig from the famous Spindletop gusher drilled by Anthony Lucas in 1901 on the Texas Gulf Coast. My statement about the wells being in West Texas was therefore incorrect.
4:42 PM LINK
Beefing Up
I just got off the phone with Linda at the Old Corner Bookstore, which is located in downtown Fort Collins, Colorado. I was in there last week while visiting my parents.
It's one of my favorite little used bookstores, and I also drop by there whenever I am in town. As usual I located a few treasures.
My incredible find this time was a 1941 publication by the American Association of Petroleum Geologists entitled Future Oil Provinces of the United States and Canada, edited by A. I. Levorsen. It cost me exactly four dollars plus tax. I was very excited, since it is exactly the kind of technical publication I need to be able to understand.
The book had evidently been once owned by petroleum geologist named R.G. De Good.
My call to the bookstore today was because I didn't have the foresight to buy two other AAPG books they had on the shelf. Both were also owned by R.G. De Good. One was on the petroleum geology of the Uintah Basin in Utah. The other was on Alberta. I like the fact that they are old publications, since I can immediately know "how the story turned out." I figure it's a good way to acquire the ability to read current petroleum geology studies and projections.
Also there was a copy of Fundamentals of Rock Mechanics, by Jaeger. It's a nice thick volume with lots of equations, the kind of material we physicists love. This is precisely the best way I can leverage my background as a physicist in the study of this material.
But in case you're not mathematically inclined, don't worry. The equations are just for me, to help me understand. I won't be using them in my blog.
Linda was happy to pull the books off the shelf for me. The Old Corner Bookstore has no e-commerce facility at all, and no web site. I have to send them a check, and then she will put the books in the mail for me. So quaint.
12:23 PM LINK
The Rocks that Produce Oil
Let's begin with geology. Where is oil (i.e., crude petroleum) found?
First let's start with the rocks that produce oil.
Oil is produced underground in certain kinds of sedimentary rocks, i.e., rocks laid down in stratified layers through the deposition of water-borne materials, typically at the bottom of seas. For reasons I will discuss later, it turns out that the oil-bearing sedimentary rock must have located at the bottom of a shallow sea, or on a continental shelf. Deep-sea sedimentary rock is unsuitable for the creation of oil reserves. Since most of the earth's surface is open ocean, this eliminates much of the world's surface as possible oil provinces.
Of course, this doesn't mean that the oil province must be underwater now, just that it was underwater during some critical time in the past.
One hundred million years ago, much of the Great Plains of North America was submerged under such a shallow sea. Much of the sedimentary rock visible there today was laid down during that time period.
Over the course of the millions of years, this sea fluctuated in its boundaries. Geologists believe that at one point, the shallow sea spread across much of North America. One can envision it as an extension of the Gulf of Mexico across Texas, up along the Rockies through Wyoming, Alberta, and into the Arctic Ocean on the north slope of Alaska.
To see a map of this sea, click here. (the map is from this page)
The sedimenatary rock laid down during the existence of this shallow "Cretaceous Sea" in fact provides the bulk of the current oil provinces of the United States, Canada, and Mexico.
By the way, the Rockies were not yet formed at this time. In fact, it was the uplifting of the Rockies as range through plate tectonic processes that raised the level of North America, dispersing the Cretaceous Sea.
Note: oil province is not my term, but one used extensively the oil indusry to describe any large oil-producing region.
Note: a more precise term for shallow sea is an epieric sea, which means a sea that lies on top of continental crust (i.e., not an arm of deeper ocean beds).
Note: it appears as that sedimentary rocks may have been discovered on Mars. This would support the claim that water once existed in liquid form on Mars. For reasons I'll discuss, however, it is extremely unlikely that these Martian rocks would contain any petroleum reserves.
12:14 PM LINK
My Future as an Oil Man
As I promised to myself, I began reading Deffeyes book with intention of understanding petroleum geology and his prediction that world oil supply would begin declining within the next seven years. If the prediction comes true, it would have vast geopolitical consequences.
Blogger, the tool I use to write this, has been down lately, so it gave me a chance to reread the first couple chapters of the book thoroughly. Also I spent a day stranded in a cowboy bar in Concourse A of the Denver airport earlier this week, and with a couple Jamesons', I really got into the material.
Petroleum geology is fascinating--a mixture of both earth sciences and organic chemistry. I regret not being around an academic institution where I could actually begin to make it a formal specialty of mine. At U.T., I used to walk by the petroleum engineering building on my way to my office. Outside the building was a composite statue made of drill bits from famous gushers in West Texas, with the date on which they "blew out" and the yield in barrels. The oil lands there provide much of the endowment base for the university's permanent fund, which is used in material construction. It's the reason why so many god-awful new structures popped up on the "Forty Acres" so quickly during the 1970's.
Maybe walking past those drill bits has finally started to rub off on me.
Of course, right now I can only dabble as petroleum geology theorist, a would-be petroleum geophysicist, if you will. To be a real petroleum geologist, you have go out and spend several years in the field, working around rigs and testing rocks. The American Association of Petroleum Geologists would never admit me based on my casual geophysical interests alone. Deffeyes, however, has such a background.
