When gas gets to $10 gallon, people will only care about not drilling through a live caribou. I ain't saying we can't take the oil, I'm saying that we don't have to spoil the environment at the same time. Simple things like directional drilling will cut down the number of rig pads drastically. And roadless access via watercraft and helicopter will keep the yahoos out of there. We can have our cake and eat it, too. All we have to do is give a damn.
Just yankin' yer salty, rusty chain, Mr. Red. I'm all about alternative fuels. For instance, the methane in my house on a Monday night is enough to run a small car for a day... Loves me some red beans! I do wish the damn eco-nazis would lose my damned address, though.
The oil companies have been using non-intrusive technology in Alaska since they started drilling there. I have seen photos of sites that have closed down and the effects on the environment are negligible. It is not true that they have refused to use non-intrusive technology because it is expensive. Oil research and exploration is an expensive business; that is the nature of the industry. It is something the oil companies are used to. We need to drill wherever we find oil. In light of the current energy crisis it just does not make sense to leave it in the ground because of an unreasonable fear.
And this is the big picture. Because the Russians were forced to find out what they could about oil,they spent years developing techniques to get that oil.While the United States had every water well digger with 15 teeth in his head running around Oklahoma and Texas sticking hole after hole in the ground ,the Russians were developing techniques to go after deep oil in hard rock.To this very day they beat us on drilling techniques.Who holds the record for deepest hole dug...the Russians at a little over 42000 feet ,although exxon claims the record even though they only went to around 38000 feet..And while the United States tries to get around hard rock by slant or directional drilling,the Russians just dig right through whatever is there.In fact ,they look for the granite and basalt actually expecting to find oil there. Are they better than us. At drilling, yes they are. The Russians are not idiots and neither are we.Although ,the Russians put a man in space before we did and a satellite in orbit before we did .We put our best scientists onto beating them to the moon.We won.I would sincerely hope that we haven't put our best scientists onto our drilling defiencies since we obviously still lag far behind the Russians in that regard.
Red ,in regards to the 2nd law of thermodynamics.I am not a scientist but I am a pretty good poker player.I remember the thermonynamics laws as it relates to poker. God is the house.He takes a rake off every hand. rule #1 }you cannot win the game. rule #2} you cannot break even in the game rule #3} You cannot leave the table. the second law would revolve around entropy ...things becoming more disordered.Since you claimed earlier that dinosaurs did not become oil and that oil is plankton and microbes and rocks that were once the ocean floor eventually becoming oil,shouldnt we be able to take a beaker full of plankton and microbes from now and turn it into oil using the temperatures and pressures that we thought it formed under.Has any experiment like this turned plankton into oil,or would the plankton just eventually disintegrate into nothing?.Was the plankton different back then?That is a lot of plankton to turn into all the oil we have used and have yet to use on earth right now.I don't really buy the dinosaur theory either ,but at least dinosaurs are big.Maybe we can take another reptile like a gator and do an experiment with it.We ought to be able to squeeze at least a couple of quarts of oil out of a 14 foot gator.Or would the gator simply decompose and become dust.Entropy Help me here ,like I said ...i am not a scientist.I just think i know Bull$hit when i step in it.
The real question is, since we are talking about gators, would anybody care? Sounds like a win/win to me with the gator thing.:wink:
Well, this post makes sense to me. I don't know anything about it, but I wouldn't be that surprised if you are right that the Russians might be currently better at drilling than us. But, we Americans seem to always catch up fast as soon as we see that we are behind in some sort of important technology that someone else is developing. Like you said, we did it in the space program with Russia. We also did it in the world of supercomputers with Japan. I have to admit, it is quite insane how American scientists and engineers have this knack of always trumping everybody on technological issues that we care about (sure, Japan is better at building toy robots than us, but we don't care about that). If it is true that Russia is better at drilling than us, I don't think it will take too long before we surpass them. Come on, give me another example of something technological that Russia is better than us at. Russian jet fighter planes vs. American fighter planes? Russian infantry guns vs. American infantry guns? Etc. etc. etc.
Well, that's not exactly it . . . :hihi: The Second Law of Thermodynamics forbids (due to statistical improbability) that two bodies of equal temperature, when brought into contact with each other and isolated from the rest of the Universe, will evolve to a state in which one of the two has a significantly higher temperature than the other. I fail to see how the biogenesis of petroleum violates this. How, exactly? Indeed. Lab experiments have turned plankton into petroleum. In fact some experiments may allow turning modern phytoplankton into biopetroleum on industrial scales. The plankton total biomass is enormous. There is a LOT of plankton out there, kedo! This is an oceanic planet and plankton is the most abundant life form in the ocean, 98% of the oxygen on earth is produced by phytoplankton! It's at the very bottom of the food chain--the very wide base of the pyramid. When the earth has suffered plankton depletions, mass extinctions occurred. Sure. Left to oxidize on the surface, the gator would become dust. However buried in anaerobic sediments and exposed to extreme heat and pressure, the Carbon in its remains can become fossil fuel. Trouble is there ain't enough gators to produce huge quantities of oil. Never have been. However plankton exists in huge numbers and always has. And it is among the earliest life, so it can be found in the oldest and deepest sedimentary rocks. But you must also know the Shinola, Grasshoppa.
Follow your instincts. American oil drilling technology is and has always been the cutting edge and the overwhelming technology used worldwide. Our oil and gas technology is one of our best and most important exports. Sure foreign engineers sometimes come up with an innovation, but it pales in comparison with the century of steadily progressing US petroleum technology.
Correct. American Technology and Americans drive just about every significant oilfield in the world. Even Schlumberger, a "French" company, has almost all their major reseach facilities in the US, and employs more Americans then any other nationality (Myself included). The language of the oilfields throughout the world is "American", as the British ex-pats say.
