The world's reserves outside of the Middle East is about 34 years.
If we don't find new oil outside of the Middle East, we'll be totally dependent on it.
But daring new theories are leading geologists to believe that hidden deep in the earth are
greater reserves than we'd ever dreamed of.
Will time and money run out before scientists can prove that the world is full of oil?
Funding for NOVA is provided by the Johnson & Johnson family of companies, supplying health
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Major funding for NOVA is provided by this station and other public television stations
nationwide.
The Texas Gushers, the year 1930, boom times for American oil.
Largely responsible for the boom was a new breed of scientists, oil geologists.
They had revolutionized the search for oil with their ingenious ideas about how to find
deposits deep beneath the earth's surface.
And for a while, their success made America's supply seem unlimited.
Just 40 years later, the Arab oil embargo made America panic about running out.
Our own oil was getting difficult and expensive to find, and importing from the Middle East
had suddenly become risky.
In 1987, our worries about oil escalated.
While American and European navies struggled to protect the flow of abundant Persian Gulf
oil, many geologists called for an all-out effort to find new supplies.
The world's reserves outside of the Middle East is about 34 years.
The OPEC oil, especially the Middle East, they have about maybe 200 years of oil left.
And if we don't find new oil outside of the Middle East, we'll be totally dependent on
it, and so will the rest of the world.
Can geologists bring about another boom in oil discoveries and find new supplies to restore
the world's energy security?
What new theories are they working on to find this oil?
Where are they looking?
And why is it so difficult?
The last major discovery in the continental United States was over a decade ago, here
in western Wyoming.
Geologists had to stretch the limits of their ingenuity and technology to find this oil,
and the difficulties they faced are a good illustration of what oil explorers are up
against today.
Art Berman is a geologist with Amaco, the company that finally figured out where to
find the oil here.
Exploration actually began in western Wyoming back in 1848, when a prospector drilled at
a spot where oil was leaking out at the surface.
That's how oil was found in the early days.
But in the next century of exploration, 220 more wells were drilled here, hardly producing
more than a few drops.
The prospectors were all convinced there was a lot of oil, but they were searching for
something underground they couldn't see.
And that remains the basic problem of oil exploration.
The rock layers bending around the top of this cliff long warned how complicated the
geology of the area might be.
For they tell the story of how 75 million years ago, a violent force pushed and lifted
great sheets of rock to create a low mountain range.
The process is called overthrusting, Art Berman.
We're flying along one of the major thrust sheets within this western Wyoming thrust belt,
and what we see is some very light colored gray units up on the top part of the hillside,
and below them some greenish, kind of tannish, vegetated slopes.
That represents a major break in the rock types, the upper ones having been overthrusted
on top of the lower ones.
This is one of the best exposures of a thrust fault that you can see anywhere, which has
taken perhaps 15,000 feet of rock section from far to the west and lifted it up on top
of younger rocks which lie below it.
Overthrusting has occurred in many parts of the world, and it's a process that does some
pretty strange things to rock.
This U-shaped structure is the result of powerful overthrusting forces literally folding the
rock layers.
And here's the most dramatic example of overturned folded rock visible anywhere in Wyoming.
One of the things that we carry away from looking at the overall thrust belt in this
western Wyoming region is that rocks can do incredible things, and not only can do, but
will do it.
In fact, rocks would rather fold than break.
The way rock was moved around here in the overthrust made oil exploration very complicated,
and yet, without such dramatic rock movements, there wouldn't be any oil.
It's really incredible when you think of it that oil could be formed at all.
There are so many coincidences and so many fortuitous events which have to happen to
produce any of it, much less the quantity that has apparently been produced through
geologic time.
And the forces which went into creating all that oil are the same forces that have uplifted
these mountain ranges, were standing in, and have created the depressions for the lakes
to form in.
According to geologists, the formation of oil and gas typically begins with the creation
of a basin, a place where the earth's crust sinks or splits to create a large container.
The basin fills with water from rivers or the sea, and collects biological debris, like
dead fish, leaves, and microscopic plankton.
This debris accumulates for millions of years, until there's a dramatic climate change.
If the area becomes a desert, sand piles up.
Every climate change leaves behind different sediments.
Each layer can build up to hundreds of feet, and the tremendous weight compresses the sediments
into rock.
All along, heat from inside the earth makes the lowest layers very hot.
Geologists believe this heat transforms biological sediments into oil.
If the temperature gets high enough, the oil is transformed into gas.
Once created, oil and gas tend to move upward through the rock.
They travel easily in porous rock, but get diverted sideways when they hit rock made
out of finer material.
New rock movements within the earth's crust often trap oil at a high spot, and it's traps
like these that geologists look for when they search for oil and gas reservoirs.
Most people have an impression that when we drill into the ground and speak of reservoir,
we're talking about some kind of a great underground cavern.
That's really not the case.
This is a piece of reservoir rock that I have in my hand.
It's a sandstone.
It's not a hole in the ground.
You can see that the oil has moved into this rock and saturated with its black color the
parts of the rock which have the most permeability.
We produce oil out of rocks.
To me, that's really the miracle of oil and gas migration that somehow we can move it
through a substance like a rock.
The main challenge of oil exploration is to find deep reservoir rock formations that are
trapping oil.
In the early days, geologists had to rely on surface clues to guess where those formations
were located a mile or more underground.
But in the late 1920s, a new technology came along that allowed geologists to see right
down into the earth.
This is a seismic line being shot today in the Wyoming over thrust.
At one end of the operation is a crew setting up a sound source strong enough to penetrate
deep into the earth.
Here they're using dynamite.
The crew sets up posts along a 10-mile line laid out by surveyors.
There's a bag of dynamite for each post and every five bags get wired together.
Along the same line, several miles away, another crew sets up a system to pick up sound waves
created by the blasts.
The sound receivers are called geophones, sturdy microphone-like devices.
A line of several thousand geophones will be needed to record the sound waves created
by a blast.
Each geophone is connected to a cable which carries information back to a portable recording
station called the doghouse.
Here signals picked up by individual geophones are recorded on magnetic tape.
These sound signals can be used to produce an image of the earth's rock layers below,
thanks to a basic phenomenon of physics.
As sound waves travel down into the earth, every time they encounter a new rock layer,
part of their energy bounces back to the surface and the rest continues downward.
An actual seismic explosion sends out sound in all directions and thousands of sound waves
return to the surface.
Now geologists can't see these sound waves traveling in the ground.
All they observe is sound arriving back at the surface sometime after the explosion.
But from this information, they can figure out the path each sound wave took.
By connecting all these reflection points, they get an image of the rock layers below.
It's time to wire up the line for another explosion, the job of a detonation crew.
Oil companies have been shooting seismic lines in the over thrust for more than 30 years
because seeing into the ground isn't as easy as it looks.
Okay, ready here big guy.
Within a second of the blast, the geophones detect thousands of reflected sound waves
and information streams back to the doghouse.
Broad data from hundreds of explosions will later be combined and processed by a high
speed computer to produce an image of the geology below.
The seismic line shot in the over thrust during the 1950s gave geologists their first educated
ideas about where the oil traps were.
The seismic data that we shot out here showed us that we had very broad open folds in the
subsurface and if you accepted this style of seismic interpretation, you would imagine
that the oil accumulation perhaps would be contained in an area something like this.
But we generally try to identify objectives which are as shallow as possible and therefore
as cheap and as easy to get to as possible.
And the seismic data early on showed that there were structures such as this one, quite
shallow.
And for economic reasons, these shallow bends in the rock became everyone's target.
Drilling a well one or two miles down could cost several million dollars even back in
the 1960s, so a geologist wanted to be confident he knew where the oil was before recommending
the investment.
Yet even after seismic images became available here in the over thrust, 130 wells in a row
failed to hit oil.
The careers of some geologists were undoubtedly ruined.
The cautious gave up, but the determined hung on, forever thinking up new ideas about where
to drill.
Ideas are critical to our business.
We've drilled in just about every area at least once and we've generally found that
we deal in a business of failure.
Most of the wells we drill are not discoveries, they're dry holes.
Therefore it becomes very important to develop a new twist, a new angle on the reasons which
were used to drill before.
To put together a story that has some intrigue and some romance to it to get us to feel well
maybe if we just tried this one more time or maybe if we applied a slightly different
idea or technique then we could find the big reserves that we really hope are there.
The new idea that finally led to a discovery in the over thrust was so simple it's hard
to believe nobody tried it earlier.
A small company named American Quasar drilled all the way down to one of these deeper structures
despite the added expense.
Sure enough, the oil was there.
As word of success spread, competing companies jumped on the drill deep bandwagon too.
Amaco was next to make a major discovery here at Rickman Creek.
But then Amaco geologists realized how lucky these first two discoveries had been.
Whenever a new well is drilled, geologists get an opportunity to look more directly at
the geology down the hole.
The process called well logging involves lowering a series of probes into the well to measure
properties of the rock.
An often used probe is the dip meter.
This device measures the angle at which rock layers cross through a well.
Every few feet the probe opens up, presses against the rock walls and takes a reading.
At Rickman Creek, the dip meter revealed the oil trap was shaped very differently from
what anyone had imagined.
Rather than being very broad open folds as the seismic indicated, in fact the structures
were very tightly folded and looked something like that.
It was good news and bad news.
Geologists now understood what they had to look for.
But folded structures like these weren't showing up on their seismic images.
Here's why.
When computers process seismic data, they must be told the speed at which sound travels
through the earth.
But sound travels at different speeds depending on the type of rock it's in.
Because geologists usually don't know how rocks are laid out under the surface, the
sound speeds have to be estimated.
These estimates are done simply, as if the rock is arranged in flat layers.
Now when this kind of estimate is applied to seismic data, a simple formation like this
is imaged to look like this.
Not exact, but close enough.
But overturned geology, tight folds, can end up looking like this, nothing like reality.
At Amaco, seismic experts set out to see the overturned structures by devising a new method
for estimating speeds.
They began by taking a rough seismic image and entering its shape into their computer.
Then they entered the various speeds, matching them up not to flat layers, but to these curved
layers.
Now, the seismic data was reprocessed and reinterpreted.
I think what we ought to do is try and bring this data up in through here into the core
and then just roll it over.
The new image showed the geology to be more tightly folded than before.
In one reprocessing step, the geology could go from looking like this to looking like
this.
Now this new image was entered into the computer and the whole process repeated.
This technique used a lot of expensive computer time, but when an image finally stopped changing,
it was accurate enough to find oil.
Once Amaco knew what to look for in the thrust belt and had a tool to find it with our seismic
and our geologic modeling, we were incredibly successful, really.
In the beginning part of the play, we couldn't do anything wrong.
It seemed as though every well we drilled either made a discovery or told us where to
go in our next well to make the discovery.
The moral of this story is one geologists usually learn early in their careers.
There's still undiscovered oil out there, and with a little luck, a lot of persistence,
and some good new ideas, it can be found.
In one decade, over 2,000 successful wells were drilled in the overthrust.
But this could be the last well ever drilled here.
Half a dozen companies have now shared in the success, and all the tightly folded structures
have apparently been found.
If there's still more oil here, it will take another new idea to find it.
For its efforts, Amaco discovered about half a billion barrels of oil and gas in the overthrust.
That may sound like a lot, but compared to demand, it's a drop in the bucket.
We actually use in this country, we use one billion barrels every 62 and a half days,
and that's an enormous amount of oil.
We haven't found a billion barrel field in North America since 1968, which is a shocking,
a very shocking thing for our country.
In Dallas, Texas, home to many oil companies that made their fortunes exploring in the
United States, the reality of smaller discoveries has hit hard.
Now, at companies like Placid Oil, geologists are looking outside America for those giant
discoveries needed to meet demand.
Placid's chief of exploration, Feathergale Wilson, is getting his company geared up to
look at Africa, one of the least explored areas of the world.
Today, Placid geologists are scanning satellite photographs and looking for rift basins, places
where the Earth's crust is literally torn open and spread apart.
Hundreds of miles long and about 50 miles wide, these basins may have collected huge
amounts of biological sediment.
If oil was generated, and if geologists can find it, rifts could become the next great
frontier.
The world actually has hundreds of rift basins distributed in about 40 rift systems, including
several large ones in North America.
That rift formations can have enormous quantities of oil was proven by a discovery in the North
Sea, but in general, rift exploration has been very discouraging.
Placid Oil is betting it can turn rift exploration around in Africa, here in the Luangwa Valley
of Zambia.
The risk is high, though.
Zambia is 800 miles away from the nearest known oil deposit, and close to several civil
wars in Southern Africa.
Before Placid commits itself to drilling, its field geologist, David Schrader, will
spend months collecting basic data and getting the lay of the land.
Here, for instance, he'll look for unusual traces of gas in the soil that might reveal
a hot spot below.
Nobody at Placid thinks it'll be easy deciding where in the rift to drill.
The biggest thing you've got to remember is the area.
We're talking about an area that's a complete basin, maybe 70,000 square kilometers.
Our particular area is about 34,000 square kilometers.
Now, within that area, to isolate it down to put a nine-inch hole in the ground is a
tremendous task.
Much of Schrader's time is spent looking for outcrops, rocks that have been squeezed up
to the surface from deep inside the rift.
These rocks can provide invaluable clues about the geological formations below.
But to make sense out of what he finds at the surface, Schrader needs a model of what
the geology should look like deep inside a rift.
One hundred miles to the east, at a lake in the country of Malawi, some new ideas about
rifts are emerging that could give Schrader the information he needs.
Underneath Lake Malawi is the East African Rift, a rift so young it's still splitting.
In theory, it resembles the Zambian Rift as it was some 200 million years ago.
It's no accident an American research team from Duke University called Project Probe
is here studying Malawi's rift.
Living and working on this cramped boat isn't easy, but in return these scientists are getting
a first-hand look at a powerful geological process, Probe's director, Bruce Rosendahl.
One of the situations happening here is a continent that's breaking apart, of course,
and that's going to ultimately make an ocean if this process continues.
So we're not just talking about a little split of a little piece of a continent, we're talking
about the birth of an ocean.
Rosendahl's goal is to get a picture of this split, something of great interest to oil
companies.
The textbook Picture of Rifts says that when the Earth's crust cracks and spreads apart,
a continuous trench is created that runs for hundreds of miles.
Over time, water erodes the trench walls, producing coarse sand along the inside edges.
This sand becomes reservoir rock and soaks up any oil generated by other sediment materials.
So today the best place to drill is over where the sand should be.
Unfortunately, oil isn't usually there.
To find out why not, a consortium of oil companies, including Placid, has funded Project Probe.
Probe's specialty is seismic surveys, conducted on water instead of on land.
As a new work week begins, a mile-long hydrophone cable is let out to pick up sound waves.
Getting the cable into place is no job for anyone who gets seasick.
How's that buoy coming down?
A series of buoys suspends the hydrophone cable just under the water's surface.
Here an air gun is used to create the loud sound blasts.
Because the Malawi Rift is still mostly filled with water, the probe crew believes this sound
will reach all the way down to the original rift bottom.
The whole probe operation is something of a technological marvel.
When oil companies conduct seismic surveys on water, they usually use a boat that's ten
times the size.
Sound generated by the air gun bounces off the rock layers below and returns to the hydrophones
trailing behind.
Air signals or reflections are picked up over the course of several seconds, an indication
the test shot has reached very deep.
With all systems working, it's time to start recording data.
For the next four days, Probe's boat will creep along at just two miles an hour, setting
off a shot once every 20 seconds.
The only excitement comes when crew members race to make a tape change between shots.
Data collection continues nonstop 24 hours a day.
Hey, good night, bubba.
Good night, Deb.
Good night.
Hope this day is calm.
Yeah, good night, Deb.
Good night.
From data collected so far, Rosendahl already has a fairly clear idea of what rifts look
like, and it's nothing like the traditional textbook model.
Remember, this is the textbook model.
But Rosendahl's data suggests rifts form in a series of curved and overlapping sections
that drop seesaw fashion in opposite directions.
Where the sections overlap, a high point develops between them to relieve stress.
Rosendahl calls this high point an accommodation zone.
In a makeshift classroom at the Hart Hotel and Bar, Rosendahl gives his crew an impromptu
geology lesson, as well as a few beers.
I've drawn in the Livingston border fault system here and the Assisiia border fault system
here.
The recent data collected by the crew shows clear evidence of an accommodation zone under
the north end of Lake Malawi.
Let's spend a few minutes talking about this accommodation structure, and let me get over
here.
Notice that we have a bowing of the sediments here, like so, and the deeper we go, the more
this is bowing.
Now, this is a pinned zone, an accommodation structure created by this border fault facing
that border fault.
Discovering these accommodation zones has more than academic significance, because these
could be the secret to locating the oil in rifts.
In a newly formed rift, erosion might produce good reservoir sand around accommodation zones.
So in a rift that's covered with sediment, the best place to drill could be in the middle,
instead of near the outside edge.
At the southern end of Lake Malawi, this mountain appears to be an accommodation zone that hasn't
been covered over yet.
This structure behind us is an accommodation zone created between two facing border faults.
That accommodation zone has created this kind of sand.
This is, after all, the byproduct of erosion of these accommodation zones.
So what we have here is reservoir rock in the process of being born, and the importance
of the model is that we can predict where we have these structures with the probe model
of rifting, hence we can predict where we have this kind of rock being created.
We have, in effect, a way of predicting reservoir rock within the rift environment.
Back in Zambia, where the rift is older and completely filled in, David Schrader is looking
for a reservoir area using Rosendahl's model.
He's trying to locate buried accommodation zones by stopping at hundreds of spots in
the rift valley to take measurements with a gravity meter.
Gravity readings will vary depending on the depth of the rift below him.
If he gets high gravity readings in the middle of the basin, it's likely he's on top of
an accommodation zone.
If Schrader then finds sandstone outcrops nearby, he'll have even more evidence to
suggest he's found an accommodation zone.
This rock outcrop is sandstone, and was probably pushed up from an accommodation zone underneath.
He'll send it back to Dallas, where Feather Gale Wilson examines all the rock samples
from Zambia.
Here, he's trying to determine whether the sandstone Schrader found would make good reservoir
rock.
The best indication comes from paper-thin slices of the rock mounted on slides.
Under high magnification, Wilson can see there's a lot of pore space between the sand grains,
and that the rock has high potential for holding oil.
When enough information is in, the exploration staff gets together to decide on a next step.
As they study the gravity map, the question is, does an accommodation zone show up in
the color pattern?
You see evidence for an accommodation zone between the northern part and the central
part on that gravity data.
Yes, it appears that we have a deep in this area here that flip-flops to the other side
of the basin in the north with the deep here and a high area between them.
Now, this could be an accommodation zone, as they've been saying.
The placid geologists aren't ready to drill in Zambia yet, but feel confident they know
where to invest in seismic surveys.
Thanks to Rosendahl's model, they're a little closer to finding new oil in Africa and to
paving the way for rift discoveries worldwide.
Better models mean more frontiers, and more frontiers mean more exploration, and more
exploration means more oil.
That's the way I think the progression works.
There are frontiers much closer to home where we might look for the oil we need.
Unfortunately, with OPEC oil priced under $20 a barrel today, most oil discovered in
these locations would be too expensive to produce.
Offshore, for instance, it's only economical to produce oil in water depths up to about
1,500 feet.
Until there's a cheaper technology to build production platforms, the potentially vast
reserves under deeper water will be overlooked.
In the Arctic, severe weather makes production too costly for all but giant discoveries.
And even if the cost of cold weather operations comes down, there are environmental concerns
that could keep most of this oil off limits forever.
A more promising frontier may be tar sands, a mixture of sticky oil and sand.
In Canada and Venezuela alone, there are an estimated three trillion barrels of it, enough
to fuel the world for a century.
But oil companies have yet to develop a cost-effective way of separating this oil from the sand.
Surprisingly, the best place to look for new oil may be in the last place we'd imagine,
around wells that have been producing for years.
In a typical oil field, a staggering 70 percent of the oil stays behind after conventional
attempts to pump it out.
Geologists long believed this leftover oil was actually stuck inside the tiny pore spaces
of reservoir rock.
And in the 1950s, they tried forcing the oil out by flooding the reservoir with water.
The idea was that water entering one well might flow over to neighboring wells and sweep
up the oil that was in its path.
The technique didn't cost much and brought up another 25 percent of the oil.
Encouraged by the results, some companies in the early 80s tried pumping carbon dioxide
gas into their reservoirs to dissolve remaining oil.
An additional 10 percent came up, but an expensive plant was required to remove carbon dioxide
that came back too.
When oil prices were $35 a barrel, the investment made sense.
But when oil prices dropped, most companies scrapped these high technology projects.
Still, the idea of getting more oil without having to discover new oil fields is tempting.
At the University of Texas in Austin, geologist Bill Fisher believes companies have taken
the wrong approach to extracting their leftover oil because of a series of incorrect assumptions.
We had assumed for a long time that most of that oil would require some very advanced
technology to dislodge it and to recover it.
But in fact, in a great number of reservoirs, at least half the oil that remains is not
stuck.
It is isolated in a series of sub-reservoirs or compartments that are analogous to a building
with a lot of rooms in it as opposed to a building with only one room.
And to the extent that we can make communication with each of those rooms, we can recover a
much larger percent of this moveable oil.
Fisher's idea that reservoir rock formations are broken up into many isolated compartments
is pretty upsetting to the oil industry.
That's because the standard system for draining big oil fields using neat rows of wells is
based on exactly the opposite idea, that the oil is in a continuous layer of rock.
The assumption is that one well could drain an entire reservoir.
Only because it would take hundreds of years for all the oil to come up are many wells
used and laid out on a geometric grid.
Yet, if oil reservoirs are really made up of isolated compartments, then any compartment
not penetrated by a well won't be drained.
Evidence this is happening began to emerge in the late 70s.
U.S. discoveries were declining then.
The price of oil was high, and companies started drilling in between old wells to drain their
reservoirs faster.
Much to everyone's surprise, some new wells struck huge oil deposits under high pressure.
By chance, they had hit untapped compartments.
Today, at the Sprayberry Field of Texas, there's an experiment underway to look for these untapped
compartments.
The potential rewards here are enormous.
Many of the 10 billion barrels originally believed to be in the ground have yet to come
out.
The big challenge of a field like the Sprayberry is the tremendous volumes of oil there.
One of the reasons the recovery is very low is because of the extreme complexity and difficulty
of that reservoir.
But if you can go in and you can actually unravel a very complicated reservoir of the
kind that the Sprayberry is, you can demonstrate in very dramatic terms the concept that we
are advancing that there is substantial additional movable oil in reservoirs.
In a core sample library at the University of Texas, rocks taken from Sprayberry wells
drilled long ago are examined by Noel Tyler, a geologist and colleague of Bill Fisher's.
It's the first step in locating the Sprayberry's untapped compartments.
The distinct patterns on these rocks tell the story of a strange process which created
the Sprayberry's reservoir.
Two hundred million years ago, a sea covered much of Texas, including the Sprayberry area.
Constant evaporation in the shallow areas made the water there very salty and heavy,
and about once every hundred thousand years, streams of this dense water would plunge down
towards the seafloor, dragging along sand from the shore.
The seafloor was covered by a distinctive pattern of sediments, channels filled with
coarse sand and channel banks consisting mostly of fine mud.
Until the streams came again, a slow rain of mud blanketed the seafloor.
Over a million years, this cycle was repeated eight times.
The sand channels ultimately got filled with oil, but the channel banks and blankets of
fine mud solidified to create an impenetrable wrapping around the sand.
To get most of the oil out of the Sprayberry, a geologist would need to know precisely where
each sand channel is.
Old well tests may hold the key.
These well logs tell us what the reservoir looks like in the subsurface.
We can tell from the well logs what is sand and what is mud.
The flat part here is mud, whereas these peaks represent sand.
Of course, Tyler really needs to know where the sand is between existing wells.
But by transferring the information from each well onto one piece of paper, he can then
connect the data and construct a contour map.
It's a painstaking process, but in the end, the muddy areas, colored in green, are clearly
distinguished from the sand channels, colored in yellow.
It's easy to follow the winding sand channels, and once there's a map view for each layer
of the Sprayberry, then cross-sections can be made to visualize the rock changes occurring
between wells.
On a single cross-section, Tyler will see several sand compartments, colored yellow,
that are isolated from any of the wells shown in red.
These sand compartments should make excellent targets for drilling.
The situation that we encounter in the Sprayberry with all of its compartments is not a unique
one.
At least 75 percent of all the reservoirs in the U.S. and the world have varying degrees
of compartmentization like the Sprayberry, and they are amenable to the same kind of
analysis that we've done in the Sprayberry.
Can we find billions of barrels simply by analyzing old oil fields more closely?
On the first direct test of this idea, Mobile Corporation's Tim Ripke has teamed up with
Tyler on a joint exploration project.
So far, things are looking good.
Their well definitely hit several sand zones, and there was lots of oil.
The question is whether any of this oil is being tapped for the first time.
Drilling was completed just a few hours ago.
As soon as the drill pipe can be pulled up out of the well, the pressure of each reservoir
zone will be tested.
A high pressure will indicate the oil comes from an untapped compartment that this new
exploration idea is worth pursuing.
This type of work is real exciting for me and other people that I work with because
we are essentially finding new oil in old places where some of our predecessors have
said we give up, there's nothing else there, we're finding new oil, and that's exciting.
The pressure probe and the moment of truth.
At each sand zone below, this device will seal itself against the wall of the well and
take a pressure reading.
Suspended by a long cable, the probe makes a 7,800 foot journey down to the reservoir
level and the first pressure reading is attempted.
We've got high pressure at 3,155, set the tool, tool setting, the motor speed is up,
let's see if we can get some good pressures in this zone here.
The atmosphere is tense.
The pressure is not building.
Let's go to 7,875 and try there.
Okay.
Cecil, why don't you try dropping it down to 7,875, we'll try another test there.
The cable is let out a few more feet.
Perhaps the probe didn't get a good seal against the rough sandy walls of the well.
Hydrostatic pressure is at 3,467, setting the probe.
Once again, the pressure is low.
Yeah, it looks like the pressures are not going to build up.
Maybe the seal.
They search the well log and choose another sand zone to test.
7,8,9,10.
We're right at it again.
Right at the edge.
Okay.
We'll try it.
Yeah.
See what happens.
But tonight, the testing will be in vain.
The walls of the well are too rough to get a seal.
It's unclear if the well hit an untapped compartment.
We still don't have any idea what the pressure is right now.
We've seen the core.
The core looks great.
It nice shows oil and gas.
The sand looks very nice.
We're in a nice channel area, but because the hole's in bad shape, we just don't know
yet.
There's still some mystery involved here.
This mystery was short-lived because Mobile proved it found an untapped compartment with
the next well drilled in the spray burying.
And now, other oil fields are being analyzed by Tyler and Fisher.
If their technique can be applied throughout the oil industry, they estimate a huge addition
to our reserves.
The number we use in Texas is about 35 billion barrels, which is a tremendous volume of oil.
Not quite as much as we produce to date, but very near it.
That volume throughout the entire United States is about 100 billion barrels.
And then if you start looking worldwide, you're talking about something that's five to six
times that.
So it's a tremendous volume of oil.
Just a decade ago, most geologists had given up on squeezing more oil out of these old
fields.
But now, thanks to a powerful new idea, we may get 30 or 40 more years of oil security.
That's the nature of oil exploration, where geologists' ideas count for everything.
Grafberg, Sweden, a group of traditional fiddlers celebrates the beginning of a most untraditional
drilling project.
For them, the rig rising up out of the forest is a strange sight.
No one has ever drilled for oil or gas in mainland Sweden before.
But a radical new idea about the origin of oil and gas has led a maverick scientist to
this spot.
The international press has followed him, because if his well succeeds, it would open
up so many new frontiers around the world, the supply of oil and gas would practically
be limitless.
A local official starts up the drill, which will bore over four miles down into the earth.
From the beginning, this $20 million project was considered foolish by most oil geologists.
But the scientist behind the project, world-renowned astronomer Thomas Gold, still persuaded the
Swedes to test his theory.
Of course, it's a dream come true.
This is the first time that drilling is being done in a location that, on my basis, one
would advise, and on any other basis, one would not advise.
And the advice Gold gives?
That we can look for oil and gas even in places like this, where glaciers scraped away almost
all the sediments, because oil and gas don't come from decayed biological sediments, but
were built into the earth from the start.
I never thought that oil and gas had principally a biological origin.
Of course, it was clear that some gas can be produced biologically, there's no doubt
you can have a rubbish dump and it can make methane.
But that it would be the main source of these huge amounts that the earth possesses, no,
that I never believed.
It was an astronomer's knowledge of the solar system that made Gold reject the biological
theory.
The atmospheres of Jupiter, Saturn and Uranus all contain hydrocarbons, the compounds that
make up oil and gas.
Yet there's no biology, or life as we know it, on any of these.
So it seemed to me absurd to think that just our planet, the earth, would have produced
hydrocarbons by processes that could not have occurred in any other planet, namely biology.
That seemed to me a pretty funny point of view.
Instead, Gold believes hydrocarbons were among the basic elements that formed the earth.
Most astronomers agree the planets of our solar system were created from colliding rock,
dust and ice particles.
Gold thinks large amounts of hydrocarbons were among these materials too, and that as the
planet matured, the hydrocarbons, mostly in the form of gas, began working their way through
cracks up to the surface.
In 1977, gas was discovered coming out of cracks in the ocean floor.
No surprise to Gold.
The gas included methane that was definitely not created from biological sediments.
But much to Gold's annoyance, petroleum geologists downplayed the significance of this discovery,
saying,
Well, it's true, some hydrocarbons come from deep down, but it isn't enough to account
for the commercial deposits of oil and gas that we find.
A viewpoint that I thought was very strange, because the earth is very big, and if anything
can exist down there, it could be huge amounts.
I couldn't understand how they would know that it would be very little.
What Gold was running into, of course, was reluctance on the part of geologists to consider
dropping a theory that had served them for decades.
I guess my own feeling is that there is so much organic material, both in the modern
world system and in the rock record, that I find no particularly compelling reason to
go look for another major, major source to account for what we produce in basins.
I'm very much a conservative when it comes to this issue, and I think Tom's probably wrong.
When it looked as if geologists would never take him seriously, Gold decided there was
only one thing left to do.
I thought, well, the best thing to do would be to go to a place and find oil or gas in
a location where everybody would tell me that it was totally impossible, absolutely silly
thing to do.
If I could discover it there, then surely that would, so to speak, shake people up.
The place Gold chose was right in the middle of Sweden's popular summer resort area, the
Syllian Ring.
Known for its dramatic circle of lakes, the Syllian Ring was formed 350 million years
ago when a huge meteor crashed into the Earth.
Gold believes the impact probably cracked the Earth's crust tens of miles down, creating
a path for hydrocarbons to seep upwards and fractured the surrounding granite to make
a reservoir space for all the oil and gas coming up.
When Gold first visited Sweden, he traveled throughout the country, presenting his story
of why there should be oil and gas in the Syllian area.
In exploration, just having a good logical story is oftentimes half the battle.
While the story seemed outlandish to many local geologists, this one was eager to listen.
Twenty years earlier, the geologist had drilled a test well here in this quarry, and much
to his surprise, the hole quickly filled up with oil.
To Gold, it was an unmistakable sign he was on the right track.
There is no other liquid oil seep in all of Northern Europe, and yet Northern Europe contains
10,000 times the quantity of sediments that this ring contains.
So why in this particular point we should have seeps when all the huge areas of sediments
don't, I could not understand.
Within a year, Gold convinced the Swedes, who have almost no oil or gas reserves of
their own, to mount a geological investigation of the meteor area.
Seismic and gravity surveys were conducted to look for cracks and fractures, and surface
samples were examined for evidence of seeping oil and gas.
After three years collecting data, the geologists pooled their observations of the meteor ring
and decided it was unclear whether the impact had the effects Gold predicted.
In the face of equivocal data, the geologists, who had no experience in exploration, became
pessimistic about there being any oil or gas to find.
We know that this is a highly anomalous area, but that's all we can say.
I would simply say zero.
I don't think they exist at all.
But in a sense, it was like any other wildcat prospect.
The only way to know if there was oil or gas was to drill.
So the Swedes went ahead with the controversial project anyway.
It's the day after opening ceremonies, and Gold is on a tour of the ring.
It was a struggle to get here, but now Gold has to wait yet another year for the drill
to reach its target down through 20,000 feet of granite.
Should anything be found there, it will almost certainly be gas, because at that depth the
pressures and temperatures are too high for oil.
In all probability, though, nothing will be found, because 90% of exploratory wells fail.
Radical and controversial new ideas may be crucial to exploration, but the fact is most
of them don't work.
Gold is sure his idea will beat the odds, but he's worried even a discovery might not convince
geologists he's right about the origin of oil and gas.
Of course, there will always be people who say, well, maybe five kilometers of granite
are sitting on top of a squashed dinosaur or something that's underneath all this.
Some sediments lying underneath the granite.
Yes, I'm sure that some people will say that.
It's six months into drilling, and there's no sign of gas yet.
If it turns out Gold is right about the origin of oil and gas, we could probably discover
these fuels outside the sedimentary basins we've traditionally explored.
But even more significant, we might find gas deposits below sedimentary basins that are
producing oil and gas today in deep reservoirs that are feeding the shallow deposits we've
already discovered.
In short, we could almost stop worrying about running out.
I would say we don't have to worry for quite a long time for the supply of gas.
I think that at the present rate of usage, we're looking at a supply that can easily
be several hundred years.
If we can drill to a depth of 30,000 feet now, we can probably find huge amounts in
that depth range.
Maybe by the time we have used that up, we'll be able to drill to 50,000 feet and have another
whole earth to look over at that depth.
The implications of Gold's theories sound wonderful, but 13 months after drilling began
in Sweden, the project was shut down.
The well-encountered fractured rock at 20,000 feet, just as Gold predicted, yet only small
traces of methane gas were found.
The gas proved non-biological, consistent with Gold's ideas, but without a huge discovery,
Gold hasn't proved his theory.
He hopes to get another chance sometime soon, but for now, oil companies will be drilling
based on other new ideas.
In the past hour, we've seen how challenging it is to find new supplies of oil and gas,
how it took over a hundred years to find them in Wyoming, until luck and a new seismic theory
pointed the way, how unraveling the complexities of reservoir rock could give oil fields a
new lease on life, and how there are still new frontiers left to explore in countries
not associated with OPEC.
So the prospects for finding new supplies of oil and gas are better than we thought,
now we're coming to understand the serious environmental consequences of burning these
fuels.
The greenhouse effect means that even unlimited supplies would be no panacea.
Still for the near future, oil and gas are essential to support modern life, and whether
we'll find enough is up to geologists and their tenacious pursuit of new ideas.
To think of new ideas, of new reasons to try and drill yet another hole, you really have
to believe in your own mind that it's there, you have to somehow forget about all the bias
and all of the prejudice developed from past exploration, and it's that kind of persistence
and that willingness to take a risk because you personally believe that the oil could
be there, which results in the big plays that we have.
New ideas, if they're correct, open up new frontiers, new ways of going about the exploration
game, and those usually mean that you end up with more reserves than you thought you
had.
Well, ideas alone won't keep us in oil and gas forever, but because oil and gas are finite
resources, they are limited in terms of an absolute amount.
But that volume is so large that to the extent that we can play new concepts and ideas, we
are not looking at running out of oil or natural gas for many, many decades.
So, thank you.
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