jwatt38 t1_j06n7o5 wrote
Reply to comment by CrustalTrudger in How much gas/oil, roughly, is actually left for us to use? How long until we get to the last drop and need to start rationing? by football2106
Wasn’t there something years ago about old pockets had refilled somehow and it changed how we think the oil mechanism works? We thought it was dinosaurs and swaps and bogs + time and that was part of the “we will run out some day” thinking, but then these old pockets had filled back up and scientist weren’t sure how that happened considering we got no more dinosaurs etc. and if I’m remembering right this discovery sort of shook up the whole industry and time lines.
CrustalTrudger t1_j06pp3y wrote
I'm not aware of anything like this and I've worked adjacent to the oil & gas industry for all of my career. The vast majority of petroleum is derived from photosynthetic marine organisms (algae, phytoplankton, etc). Maybe you're thinking of the theory that some amount of petroleum is produced through abiotic mechanisms, but these ideas have been thoroughly discredited and have never yielded a successful find (e.g., Glasby, 2008). Even if we ignore that, the concept of depletion and peak oil is arguably independent of the formation mechanism of oil, i.e., it's more controlled by production (in the sense of our extraction) of oil than the way in which oil is formed (e.g., Höök et al., 2010).
jwatt38 t1_j06tdec wrote
So I probably never heard the follow up to what I was talking about. It seemed wild at the time but I don’t remember anything after that. I consume a ton of articles and crap, I get stuff mixed up, I don’t follow up. I appreciate the reply and cited sources. The Glasby 2008 reference seems about right for the time I heard something about all that. Btw I also appreciate you not being a dick in your reply as so many folks can be on the ole Reddit. I live in the Texas panhandle, oil, gas, water are all pretty common topics here, but I’m most certainly on the outskirts of knowledge. Thanks again for citing sources to read later.
cejmp t1_j076det wrote
>I'm not aware of anything like this and I've worked adjacent to the oil & gas industry for all of my career.
Some of the fields in the South Delta block in the GOM were reporting increasing reserves back in like 2003, Devon Energy. I can't find anything with Google about it, but we were working for them. It could have been South Marsh Island, I don't remember.
michaelrohansmith t1_j09825i wrote
Maybe oil is slowly soaking out of other areas into the places we collect from.
fman84 t1_j07jpg7 wrote
I remember something like this as well. Oil does not come from dinosaurs but is actually from tiny sea life like plankton. It settles on the sea floor and over millions of years of heat and pressure it changes to crude oil. I recently read an article that talks about samples being taken from various places around the world showing new oil forming. Logically we know that life in water has not stopped so there is a constant supply of new organic material being deposited that will eventually convert to oil. It just takes a very long time. Likely there are layers of organic material at various stages of conversion.
Belzeturtle t1_j08kxnj wrote
>We thought it was dinosaurs
No one thought that ever. Oil was produced from marine organisms, not dinosaurs, about 300M years ago, which was about 70M years before the first dinosaurs.
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