re: the black gold status.. oil refills

Epitanman, definately NOT SILLY!

Just been on the hunt for hot oil stories and came across this little gem.... Notably oil being produced from 6 klms down - but also great gems about oil reserves being refilled from below after initial draining has occurred. Fascinating stuff...


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If it's clear that the fields are refilling, then of course the cartel greatly weakens, and the individual nations will try to outsell the others. So it's very important economically who is in the right.



How much more oil is there in your view of the world than in the view of traditional petroleum geology?



Oh, a few hundred times more.



But not all of it is accessible at the moment?



It becomes accessible by recharging, and the recharging process I think I completely understand. There's a stepwise approximation of the pore pressure to the rock pressure - that will always be the case if the stuff is coming up from below. You will not just fill up one reservoir at the top in the shallow levels. It will always be underlaid by another reservoir, and that in turn by another, and so on for a long way down.



And by pumping out oil from the highest reservoir you release the pressure on the lower ones, allowing more oil to seep up.



Yes, the partial seal between the surface reservoir and the one below in some cases appears to break open violently.



What's the evidence for that?



Many fields have produced several times as much as the initial testing of their magnitude would have indicated. Some geologists frankly agree that fields are refilling themselves - Robert Mahfoud and James Beck, who say fields in the Middle East are refilling, and Jean Whelan, who has observed a site refilling in the Gulf of Mexico - though they won't concede my theory is correct.

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full interview with World-class contrarian Thomas Gold is to be found here...

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.07/gold_pr.html




Your onetime colleague Carl Sagan used to say that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. What evidence did you have for geologists who found your claims about oil extraordinary?



In Sweden I produced oil by the ton from 6 kilometers down. Eighty barrels we pumped, perfectly ordinary crude oil, entirely in nonsedimentary rock, in granite. It looked like perfectly good stuff.