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2017 | OriginalPaper | Chapter

3. Some Basics of Petroleum Geology

Author : S. W. Carmalt

Published in: The Economics of Oil

Publisher: Springer International Publishing

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Abstract

The fossil fuels are the remains of plants and animals. Mother Nature recycles. Many living things become the food for something else. Plants become the food of herbivores, and herbivores become the food of carnivores.

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Footnotes
1
This is probably why we respire (breathe) rather than ferment.
 
2
Arkhipov et al. (2014).
 
3
Technically, “tight” simply means that the strata has low permeability, so there are situations where the oil has seeped from the shale into another impermeable layer which is not shale. Another situation is for the shale layers which contain the organic source material to be interbedded with thin, impermeable siltstone or limestone layers which have low permeability. All of these are tight oil deposits.
 
4
Fire fighters also do this, adding small amounts of a polymer to water so that it will have less friction going through the fire hoses and hence reach further into the fire. In effect, they make the water more slippery, see Gleick (1988).
 
5
An Olympic standard swimming pool (50 × 25 × 2 m) holds 2.5 million liters; so visualize 6 Olympic swimming pools worth of water needed to frack a well.
 
6
Depending on the shale, the contaminants may include chemicals that render the water carcinogenic if subsequently treated to be used as drinking water, or in other cases may be made radioactive (Warner et al. 2013).
 
7
A number of financial services provide price quotations, for example http://​www.​nasdaq.​com/​markets/​natural-gas.​aspx. Consulted 2015-01-27 for the figures quoted.
 
8
The Red Queen Effect is named for the Red Queen in Lewis Carroll’s Through The Looking Glass (1871). The Red Queen says “Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!”.
 
9
According to Murphy and Hall (2010) the Cleveland et al. article in 1984 seems to be the first use of the specific EROI acronym; the concept had been articulated earlier, e.g., by Hall (1972) and Hall et al. (1979a, b).
 
10
Canada and the oil companies prefer the term “oil sands”.
 
11
Canada and Venezuela have at least 300 billion barrels of reserves primarily because of their large tar sand deposits; this compares to 55 billion barrels for the USA (BP Statistics 2014). These large reserves, available at known costs, are the economic equivalent of a chemically buffered solution. Economically, the EROI for oil shouldn’t go below the EROI for tar sands—if it does, more tar sand oil will be produced holding the EROI to that value. Because the tar sand reserves are there and the entire technology is known, bringing more oil into production is only a timing question of opening more mines and constructing other needed infrastructure.
 
12
The Green River oil shale, located in the area where Colorado, Utah and Wyoming meet, is one of the best understood and largest of oil shale deposits. It has been known for a long time, because when early trappers used it to surround a campfire, the heat from the fire could finish the conversion of kerogen into oil and the rock would “burn”. While the calculation of potential hydrocarbon resource is very large, no matter what the price of oil, oil shale always requires a price that is a bit higher to make economic sense.
 
Metadata
Title
Some Basics of Petroleum Geology
Author
S. W. Carmalt
Copyright Year
2017
Book
The Economics of Oil

Print ISBN: 978-3-319-47817-3

Electronic ISBN: 978-3-319-47819-7

Copyright Year: 2017

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-47819-7_3