Over 3,200 Gulf oil wells abandoned and possibly leaking

ound:That's a lotta carbon.

 

lol. Nice!

I think the answer is that the adiabatic machinery was turned on by Sarah Palin only recently. No time to accumulate.

 

Kinda like in Total Recall, but with oil instead of atmosphere?

 

Yep, and with Sarah instead of Ahnold.

 

Hi All,

I doubt abiotic oil is available in useful quantities.

But, how about pumping waste vegatation down wells and see if we can prime new oil production in 100 years? Or would that just make natural gas? And what we really need is waste animal matter? How much do we really know about the chemistry of the natural oil ? Did these resovoirs exist at lower higher temperature higher pressure layers, and or the oil come up from lower layers? If not, then one might think that one could use an old oil well as a petroleum pressure cooker, just supply the new feed stock and 100, 200 , 1000 years ?

On the disucssion herein, its interesting how people will go for anything that maintains a future similar to the past, and its just present leaders that are the problem with getting back to the future. Like nothing has really changed, but the people.

PBS had three good hours on energy issues on Wednesday night. Two of the hours was done by a Scientific American reporter , and another was a new NOVA episode. Nova was heavy into how here we are thirty years later, and Jimmy Carter is still right. A universty in the NE recovered the scrap solar water heaters from the White House, and has been using them since.

Here is the link to the NOVA episode:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/tech/power-surge.html

 

Maybe we need to recalculate for only 6,000 years. Only 3.06 * 10^17 kg. :madgrin:

 

oil is typically the result of marine micro organism burial/cooking. The timescales you're proposing are very, very short geologically and to my knowledge the feedstock is incorrect. It would make much more sense to just gasify and Fischer/Tropsche the feedstock and have the oil now.

 

Hi Tripp,

Allot of the natural geologic process is just getting the feedstock down to a layer with the right density/pressure. That alone is probaly 50k to 100 K years. By pumping the feedstock down, you short circuit that time. And then only need the reaction time.

But, no I do not know how long the actual chemistry takes either.

 

As long as there is electricity on the server there will be popcorn every time you look. When the server breaks or is disconnected from power or the web, or the page is killed they stop making the popcorn. Even virtual reality has limited resources:welcome:

 

At least we haven't mentioned sheep yet. Oops, now I have. :madgrin:

 

So you're changing the subject to drilling sheep? :bolt:

 

Forty years later we can't even put together a green infrastructure that is cost efficient or doesn't destroy the economy. A recent report by "Verso Economics" states that for every green job produced in the UK 3.7 other jobs are lost and the cost of energy rises. Can you imagine if we had started this back in the 70's? By the time Jimmy Carter came around with the oil embargo and inflation had spiraled your green investment costs out of control this movement would have gone down in smoke and flames with the very real possibility of it being delayed even further down the line. No I think the timing is correct although I still think we're pushing it too fast for the level of technology that we now have and the economic situation we are in. My .02 cents.

I propose that we make our "Clean Energy" policy one in which we convert over to Natural Gas. Not only would we stimulate our economy by converting all the vehicles to this fuel but we would keep the money here that would be going to the middle east. So yea . . .

DRILL BABY DRILL!​

 

So maybe not.

 

Well, I enjoy living in my passive solar house, (1890's farm house redone) with passive solar heat contributing ~60% the heating load, solar hot water heat contributing ~80% to the hot water load, all at an installed cost comparable to conventional heating systems.

Those who say that alternative energy is "expensive" or exotic don't
have any first hand experience. As I have said before, conservation is your cheapest energy dollar, and then make sustainable alternatives less
costly, net/net.

Between driving the Prius, living in a well designedut not expensive efficin house, the rising costs of energy effect us little, and the higher they get, less they effect us.

An investment now in PV for example at the very least, locks in your electricity costs going forward. So one might logically think that at curreent kwh cost PV is expensive today, but very day that goes on, the equation gets closer, and for those that have invested longer ago, the payoff just gets better and better.

Some like to cite examples of how moving to sustainable energy "costs jobs", but if we looked at the true and total cost of our energy choices, many Of those jobs are no productive in the real economy,, such as that our military costs are in protecting our energy sources. There are other examples that are too numinous to mention.

Icarus

 

Well I think my point is still valid even though the Saudi's have huge reserves we have enough at home to supply our own needs, thus, negating the need to send money to them or the Middle East for our energy needs. Have you seen the report linked in this news story?

Energy Tribune- U.S. Has Earth

 

You could just as easily have said the same thing about oil in 1910.

 

and consider the rate at which NG fired power plants are coming on line our NG reserves will dwindle quickly. In the 1970's, the US had over 600yrs of coal reserves. In 2010, about 40 years later, we had ~250yrs of coal reserves... the same thing will happen to NG.

 

It certainly makes it clear that poor energy policy can do more damage than good. It does not show that a smart policy must be devoted to fossil fuel. I would like to separate two opposing points. The purpose of a smart policy would to make sustainable economic energy, not a job stimulus program. The cost of electricity should be the measure of success, not the number of jobs generated.

A smart policy would also have a very long term transition program to sustainable energy, say about 150 years, not the space of a couple administrations. If this was the case, then the slow transition presently underway to electric vehicles should continue and a shift to NG autos would not be needed. Note that the 150 years allows technology developments necessary for a lot of technology development and would allow the economically poor solutions to be avoided and the effective ones to be maximized.