Most recently, geologically speaking, the whole of the North American plate has been moving westward, and lands, island chains, small continents, pieces of ocean floor, etc, have been accreted onto the plate as it moved west and overran what used to be there. Giving to Union I know where oil does not come from, plants and dinosaurs at 40,000 feet. Photo by Bruce Wells. A few years ago I was asked to review one of those deep water discoveries in the Gulf of Mexico, and although the productive layer was very thick, and the oil in place was very large, I suggested they should not expect more than a 15% recovery factor, because the fluid/rock/temperature and geology just werent good enough to do anything but cherry pick the better spots. Although, it remained the deepest hole on the planet for five years. Slow moving currents in the layers under the crust push the plates around the planet over time. The MD vs TVD issue even evaded the notice of the American Oil & Gas Historical Society. If buried deep enough the sulfur will undoubtedly melt naturally. How deep into the ground are we able to go? https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://m.youtube.com/watch%3Fv%3DFHtvDA0W34I&ved=2ahUKEwj73Ky8897hAhVDmIsKHbfZCfAQwqsBMAB6BAgGEAU&usg=AOvVaw3fMJb2nOZzbkk6cRpI1kqX. This is perhaps the most geologically ignorant sentence I have ever read When this happens, and part of the plate being uplifted is ocean crust, a situation occurs where ocean floor rocks and sediment get lifted onto land, and often these same collisions cause the plates to crinkle up or get fold and/or compressed, and the result is mountain ranges. BPs Tiber discovery on Keathley Canyon Block 102 logged oil pay below 30,000 TVD. The Anadarko Basin extends across western Oklahoma into the Texas Panhandle and into southwestern Kansas and southeastern Colorado. Perhaps the most well-known effort to pierce the Earth is Project Mohole (began in 1961), which was an attempt to drill through the Earths crust in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Mexico where the crust is shallow. This motion is typically a few inches per year. There are many such places around right now, such as Hudson Bay. Nicholas McGinley, thank you for your patient, in-depth explanations that have educated me, the a freshman geology student, with no understanding of geology. They drilled assuming it was an overthrust, and tried drilling through the granite, You can see the entire Anardako geological sequence on the road cuts as you drive I35 through the Arbuckle Mountains, the zones are laying sideways, Walk toward the fire. 2745 Hacks Cross Road Way out of my comfort zone and not trying to speak for DM, but cracking I think is an industry term for the breakdown of long petroleum hydrocarbon chains into smaller ones, I guess which occurs at higher temperatures. Citation formats. I worked for Enserch from 1981-1997. The geological paradoxes are interesting as there are now more than four paradoxes. , In petrochemistry, petroleum geology and organic chemistry, cracking is the process whereby complex organic molecules such as kerogens or long-chain hydrocarbons are broken down into simpler molecules such as light hydrocarbons, by the breaking of carbon-carbon bonds in the precursors. The ultra-deepwater Lower Tertiary play in the Gulf of Mexico and the deep subsalt plays offshore Brazil are often cited as examples of abiotic oil because the reservoirs are supposedly too deep, too hot and/or too highly pressured to be in the oil window. The average number of slots on a fixed platform in the Gulf is 8. Original Published Date: June 1, 2006. Its not subduction. & USGS World Energy Assessment Team. Anyway, when I first saw the graphic, I immediately thought of the story of Joe Kittinger, who went all the way up past 100,000 in a helium balloon back in 1960. The drilling was started October 25, 1972 and it took Lone Star a little over a year and a half to reach 31,441 feet (9,583 m) on April 13, 1974. This is almost impossible to explain to a freshman geology student, much less people with no understanding of geology. Several different times for some of these rocks. The era of the gushers when oil didnt just flow out but burst out, is long over. [3], According to publicly available well records from the Oklahoma Corporation Commission, the Bertha Rogers hole ceased production of natural gas in July 1997 and has since been plugged and abandoned. Run of the mill T-storms are higher than this. Drilling stopped there at six miles (9.65 kilometers) when the bit hit molten sulfur. Apparently, 12 kilometers was the maximum at the time before technical difficulties related to pressure, resistance, and heat became overwhelming. Germantown, TN 38138 1 Sanders well in Beckham County became Oklahomas deepest natural gas producing well at 24,996 feet. In a note of totally unrelated trivia: Lone Star Producing became . Interestingly, Fourier doesnt even mention hothouses or greenhouses, and actually stated that in order for the atmosphere to be anything like the glass of a hotbox, such as the experimental aparatus of de Saussure (1779), the air would have to solidify while conserving its optical properties (Fourier, 1827, p. 586; Fourier, 1824, translated by Burgess, 1837, pp. Digging down to take a look compares with studies made from the surface in the way that exploratory surgery compares with taking an X-ray. Going much deeper would be incredibly dangerous, as limitations such as heat, humidity, logistics, and potential seismic activity all become more intense. Her most recent poetry collection, Heart Turned Back, was published by Salmon Poetry, Ireland, in 2010. Many lost tools that cannot be recovered are drilled up or side-tracked (driven into or against the wall) and passed in drilling, Day explained. New ocean crust is always forming at the undersea places called mid-ocean ridges. It conducts heat away from the substrata toward the surface. Funny how the same people do not object to the blight of windmills covering the landscape or the concrete pads they are sited on being dug into pristine terrain. It was a science project in response to the US Project Mohole. Like its predecessors, the Bertha Rogers as a business venture was a losing proposition, he notes. IOW, whether or not such a material exists, and if it is occurring at a large volume, will not likely be settled by looking at sediments, but rather, IMO, by looking at where there are none. Fred Pearce The Climate Files: The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money & Power, This Week in Petroleum History, January 16 to January 22, This Week in Petroleum History, January 9 to January 15, Spindletop launches Modern Petroleum Industry, This Week in Petroleum History, January 2 to January 8, This Week in Petroleum History December 26 to January 1, This Week in Petroleum History, December 19 to December 25, This Week in Petroleum History, December 12 to December 18, This Week in Petroleum History, December 5 to December 11, Project Gasbuggy tests Nuclear Fracking, This Week in Petroleum History, November 28 to December 4, This Week in Petroleum History, November 21 to November 27, This Week in Petroleum History, November 14 to November 20. Are the only acceptable fuels for people are the things they eat but not the fuel that powers machines used to help grow and harvest what people eat? See the About>Contact menu under the header. The Bakken formation lies between 4500 ft. to 11,000 ft. with the Three Forks formation below it. However, by digging, we have only scratched the surface of our Earth - literally. Research genealogy for Bertha Rogers of Faversham Kent England, as well as other members of the Rogers family, on Ancestry. It required about eight hours for bottom hole cuttings to reach the surface almost six miles above. Its safe to assume that over these past ten years, the average well depth has only increased from there. These and other devices, when used with an auger stem in various combinations called jars, can secure a powerful upward stroke or jar and thus dislodge and recover the tool being sought, Day explained in his 1922 book. The Depraved and MOST Deplorable Vlad the Impaler, The Worlds Deepest Oil Well: How Bad Science Spreads on the Internet, Increase in U.S. Wildfires Due to Climate Change, Climate Change Will Increase the Number and Severity of Tornadoes. The presence or lack of 14C can also be indicative of the age. My immediate thought was : how then did snow get on the top of Mt Everest ? Key challenges included high torque and drag, wellbore positioning in a thin oil column, wellbore stability, long horizontal completions, and downhole tool telemetry. There is a girl who somehow survived being sucked up into a huge thunderstorm in Australia while hang gliding, and wound up 10,000 meters high, at -55, unconscious, alone, and far above the death zone. Merchant of Record: A Media Solutions trading as Oilprice.com. And she lived through it. Much information comes from such holes; for example, the bottom of this hole was about 370F (190C). Its not a matter of ruling out abiotic oil. & Geological Survey (U.S.). In 1979 the No. By the early 1900s, rotary drilling introduced the hollow drill stem that enabled broken rock debris to be washed out of the borehole. Temperatures are rising dramatically, Urban Heat Islands Do Not Exaggerate Global Warming, Climate Change is Causing Accelerated 21st Century Surface Warming, We are in the Hottest Ever Period Due to Climate Change, Climate Models have Accurately Predicted 30 Years of Warming, Instrumental Temperature Records Demonstrate Man-Made Global Warming, Tipping Point 1.5 Degrees Celsius Warming, http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/dqe01, NASA has a plan defend the Earth from asteroids, Fauxcahontas: total moratorium on all new fossil fuel leases, https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/2015GC006143, https://wordpress.com/post/debunkhouse.wordpress.com/6995, https://wattsupwiththat.com/2017/02/18/oil-where-did-it-come-from/, https://phys.org/news/2005-05-world-age-oil.html, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flight_altitude_record#Hot-air_balloons, http://old.fai.org/news/personalities/35338-judyleden, http://www.airforcemag.com/MagazineArchive/Pages/2014/August, Climate Czar John Kerry: 'We planet saviors had extraterrestrial influence. 1,000 cubic feet of natural gas = 1,037,000 Btu, Current prices: Get to know us - Dr Bertha Rogers At our practice in Oxford Circus (W1W), all of our therapists are qualified psychologists, psychotherapists or counsellors. I especially like how they depict it as soil the entire way down. In addition to the important bearing that this discovery has on the general geophysical sciences, there is a potential economic impact. It is produced by bacterial action when hydrocarbons come into contact with sulfate minerals (which are plentiful in salt deposits). UmJeff, pretty sure DM just gave you the opposite of a slang definition. It's especially expensive when you factor in all of the cost of deep-bore oil extraction, including the energy expended to do it and the amount of contaminated process water. The production well, referred to as O-14, was completed in 2017 by Rosneft and Exxon, beating five previous world records for deepest wells, all drilled at the same field: Chayvo. Roughnecking jobs today are for sissies and weaklings. Think Mount Everest. On April 13, 1974, Bertha Rogers No. https://wattsupwiththat.com/2019/03/11/another-failed-energy-prediction-peak-oil-demand/, Subduction and burial (i.e., sedimentation) are two completely different processes. Something written to stop the scientific examination of the paradox observations. Yosemite Park is a famous example of this. Blasphemy! Our dialogue is finished. Looking a little more closely, it seems perhaps Fuel Fighter, or whoever made that graphic, may have not known the difference between feet and meters. 1 well have been carried out: total organic carbon, Soxhlet extraction and silica gel chromatography, C15+ saturated and aromatic hydrocarbon gas chromatography and mass spectrometry, pyrolysis, kerogen analysis, X-ray diffraction and visual kerogen analysis. The sub word most relevant to sedimentation is subsidence although subduction can create accommodation space for sedimentation. 1 rotary rig drill stem sheared, leaving 4,111 feet of pipe and the drill bit stuck downhole. The geothermal gradient is highly variable. Max Clouds height obviously wrong, vertical drilling depths obviously wrong (um, length does not equal depth unless plumb vertical). At this time development was deferred. The Tiber wells depth - true vertical depth - was more than 35,000 feet. In 1976 or 77 when I was stationed at NAS Agana Guam the weather radar guys at Anderson AFB painted a stationary offshore thunderstorm at 85,000 feet. When the derricks manila rope or wire line rope broke, a crewman lowered a hook and attempted to pull out the wells heavy iron bit. Is the U.S. UmJeff, pretty sure DM just gave you the opposite of a slang definition. It fits perfectly with the point of the article. And sometimes there are periods theres less river flow and carbonates are deposited on the sea floor as little critters die and their shells fall to the bottom. 1 reached a total depth of 31,441 feet - where it encountered liquid sulfur. Last Updated: December 26, 2022. One of the cable tool sections would eventually yield, unscrew, and be removed.. ROBERT ALEXANDER HEFNER III, PETROLEUM INDUSTRY. Many lakes exist at very high places. The Anadarko Basin is a geologic feature covering approximately fifty thousand square miles primarily in west-central Oklahoma, but including the upper Texas Panhandle, southwestern Kansas, and southeastern Colorado. It has been an intracratonic depression since at least the Cambrian Period >500 million years. Submit a Correction (Hmmmshould I close with a sarc/tag or a smiley face?). The deepest hole by far is one on the Kola Peninsula in Russia near Murmansk, referred to as the "Kola well." Id hate to be pulling slips on that rig. Basins can form through mechanisms other than subduction. 1 in Washita County, drilled in 1971 to 31,441 feet, was then the world's deepest well. Maybe these guys are opposed to people producing heat of any kind? Or at least, ALSO of abiotic nature. Earth history is like a giant jigsaw puzzle melded to a mystery story, and figuring out what has happened by looking for various clues is what geologists spend a lot of time doing. The zones were layers, about 7 potential zones, the Granite Wash was the last one to test as you came uphole. Individual users must determine if their use of the Materials falls under United States copyright law's "Fair Use" guidelines and does not infringe on the proprietary rights of the Oklahoma Historical Society as the legal copyright holder of The Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and part or in whole. down the sun. Shells Perdido spar on Alaminos Canyon 857 in 7,835 WD has no slots. Hope its obvious that that was for Gordon too. It can take 100s of thousands to millions of years for oil & gas to form and then begin the long, slow process of migration from the source rocks into porous and permeable reservoir rocks with overlying impermeable rocks and lateral trapping mechanisms. The typical person believes in PR.. Future-Directed, Employee Directory The Lone Star Producing Company 1-27 Bertha Rogers hole or well was an oil-exploratory hole drilled in Washita County, Oklahoma in 1974, and was the world's deepest hole [2] until it was surpassed in 1979 by the Kola Superdeep Borehole, dug by the USSR. P.S. It is now over 40,000 feet deep, making it the deepest hole on earth (the previous record holder was the Bertha Rogers well in Oklahoma--a gas well stopped at 32,000 feet when it struck molten sulfur). On top of the range there is a strange, flat plateau. They work by preventing the warm air inside from convecting away from the surface. Noctilucent clouds can be several times as high as nacreous clouds. So I got a few numbers wrong but hey that is why I dropped the bits of science I did not like at school to concentrate on the real important stuff like real sciencesocial science. I dont spend energy to fill my gas tank. Given the technology and funds, geologists would like to try to go deeper for core samples, but digging such holes requires much patience, money, technology, and luck. The overriding factor is economics which is frighteningly skewed today in the world of wind and solar. Because of dangerous downhole conditions, including corrosive pockets of hydrogen sulfide, the historic well had to be completed at a shallower depth. A total of four oil producers and one gas injector were planned to develop the northern portion of the reservoir. 1 Sanders well near Sayre became Oklahomas deepest gas producer at 24,996 feet. As gas prices equate more closely to value, the nations needs may be met increasingly from this massive sedimentary basin, a focal point in drilling innovation and geological interpretation. I was not aware Larry had launched a new extreme sports craze, although it seemed to be a more recent development. However, there are quite a few oil wells in the Gulf producing from oil reservoirs at true vertical depths of 20,000 to 28,000. I was going to check on those others, figuring they may all be wrong. The most slots on a TLP (tension leg platform) is 32 on the Auger A facility on Garden Banks 426 in 2,860 WD. It was also the deepest core in the world at the time. I remember being told once that the USGS had a sort of gentlemans agreement with at least some of the oil companies that if they hit economic basement, they should keep drilling long enough to recover enough rock to characterize it. Other than oil & gas, what do you think occupies the pore space in sedimentary rocks? (Miriam OBrien aka slandering Sou from Hotwhopper, that means you.). 1) No reasonable explanation for why hypothesized abiotic oil production would not have existed sometime prior to about 500 Ma ago, given Earths approximate age of 4,500 Ma. On 6 June 1979, the world depth record held by the Bertha Rogers hole in Washita County, Oklahoma, United States, at 9,583 meters (31,440 ft), was broken. It doesnt support the myth of abiotic oil in the slightest. World record for a hot air balloon flight 21,000ft Er wrong, by a factor of more than 3! But this still needs subduction because the carbonates had to get there somehow. It has nothing to do with oil formation, although it is one of the ways that large amounts of potential source material has been lost. And would you please compare the areal extent of Mt. Given the shear hysterics around AGM put around by people with very weak understandings of the sciences, who is surprised if they get the numbers wrong.who cares but isnt the graphic very pretty? Searching for oil was less an earth science and more an art in the exploration and production industrys earliest days. Well, does finding oil (petroleum) at over two miles below the surface support the abiotic theory of oil formation or not? The average bottom hole temperature of those ten 20 million barrel producers was 197F. Saint Helens. Millions of dollars hung in the balance when Houston-based Wilson Downhole Service Company, Houston, was called and tool-fishing expert Mack Ponder sent to the rescue. About 10,000 to 11,000 below the surface well within the oil window. I dont give energy back to the gas & electric companies in exchange for them being nice enough to heat and light my home. Simple sedimentary loading is one. & Geological Survey (U.S.). The remaining oil reserves we have are deeper and harder to find, not just in Russias Far East. The ultra-deepwater Lower Tertiary oil discoveries are well within the oil window. Despite the record-setting Bertha Rogers and other deep wells in the Anadarko basin, the Permian basin currently These descriptions of the Greenhouse Effect all evade the key question of heat transfer., http://geologist-1011.net/net/greenhouse/. Water and halite (salt) are less dense than most rocks. This process requires high temperatures and high pressure.[1]. An abiogenic hypothesis for oil contained in subsurface geological formations was first proposed by Georgius Agricola in the 16th century, and most recently was popularized by Thomas Gold from 1980-2000. Dating methods include vitranite reflectance and 13C isotope ratios in diamondoids (which arent diamonds). Hes completely on top of his subject and a master of communication. The oil migrated upward from deeper Mesozoic and Lower Tertiary source rocks. Other times the whole area was lifted up by compressional forces when continents collided, which is what raised the mountains to begin with. First a snippet of it for a teaser, then the link: The Greenhouse Effect was originally defined around the hypothesis that visible light penetrating the atmosphere is converted to heat on absorption and emitted as infrared, which is subsequently trapped by the opacity of the atmosphere to infrared. When controls on gas prices were lifted, Anadarko justified the faith and perseverance of The GHK Company and other operators who pioneered in deep drilling. Its locked up in the API vault in between the perpetual motion machine and the formula for turning water into gasoline . Methane isnt oil. Its based on over 100 years of drilling. This led to the creation of the Bertha Rogers Hole. Wells drilled here have been among the world's deepest. (I know. It was March 1974 and the enormous investment of Lone Star Producing Company of Dallas, and partner GHK Company of Oklahoma City, was about to be lost. Oklahoma Historical Society800 Nazih Zuhdi Drive, Oklahoma City, OK 73105 | 405-521-2491Site Index | Contact Us | Privacy | Press Room | Website Inquiries, Get Updates in Your Inbox Keep up to date with our weekly newsletter delivered straight to your inbox. It works both ways. The layered zones made it practical to dill these very deep wells as a field. The United States began a similar investigation, called Project Mohole, in 1961. Hundreds of millions of years ago, the Western US was a place where a long period of erosion had worn the land down below sea level in spots, and there existed a feature called an inland sea.