Henry Doug Henwood wrote:
> [So much for petro-Malthusianism. Now if they could just make a renewable
> atmosphere.]
>
> Wall Street Journal - April 16, 1999
>
> Odd Reservoir Off Louisiana Prods
> Oil Experts to Seek a Deeper Meaning
>
> By CHRISTOPHER COOPER
> Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
>
> HOUSTON -- Something mysterious is going on at Eugene Island 330.
> Production at the oil field, deep in the Gulf of Mexico off the coast of
> Louisiana, was supposed to have declined years ago. And for a while, it
> behaved like any normal field: Following its 1973 discovery, Eugene Island
> 330's output peaked at about 15,000 barrels a day. By 1989, production had
> slowed to about 4,000 barrels a day.
>
> Then suddenly -- some say almost inexplicably -- Eugene Island's fortunes
> reversed. The field, operated by PennzEnergy Co., is now producing 13,000
> barrels a day, and probable reserves have rocketed to more than 400 million
> barrels from 60 million. Stranger still, scientists studying the field say
> the crude coming out of the pipe is of a geological age quite different
> from the oil that gushed 10 years ago.
>
> Fill 'er Up
>
> All of which has led some scientists to a radical theory: Eugene Island is
> rapidly refilling itself, perhaps from some continuous source miles below
> the Earth's surface. That, they say, raises the tantalizing possibility
> that oil may not be the limited resource it is assumed to be.
>
> "It kind of blew me away," says Jean Whelan, a geochemist and senior
> researcher from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts.
> Connected to Woods Hole since 1973, Dr. Whelan says she considered herself
> a traditional thinker until she encountered the phenomenon in the Gulf of
> Mexico. Now, she says, "I believe there is a huge system of oil just
> migrating" deep underground.
>
> Conventional wisdom says the world's supply of oil is finite, and that it
> was deposited in horizontal reservoirs near the surface in a process that
> took millions of years. Since the economies of entire countries ride on the
> fundamental notion that oil reserves are exhaustible, any contrary evidence
> "would change the way people see the game, turn the world view upside
> down," says Daniel Yergin, a petroleum futurist and industry consultant in
> Cambridge, Mass. "Oil and renewable resource are not words that often
> appear in the same sentence."
>
> Mideast Mystery
> Doomsayers to the contrary, the world contains far more recoverable oil
> than was believed even 20 years ago. Between 1976 and 1996, estimated
> global oil reserves grew 72%, to 1.04 trillion barrels. Much of that growth
> came in the past 10 years, with the introduction of computers to the oil
> patch, which made drilling for oil more predictable.
>
> Still, most geologists are hard-pressed to explain why the world's greatest
> oil pool, the Middle East, has more than doubled its reserves in the past
> 20 years, despite half a century of intense exploitation and relatively few
> new discoveries. It would take a pretty big pile of dead dinosaurs and
> prehistoric plants to account for the estimated 660 billion barrels of oil
> in the region, notes Norman Hyne, a professor at the University of Tulsa in
> Oklahoma. "Off-the-wall theories often turn out to be right," he says.
>
> Even some of the most staid U.S. oil companies find the Eugene Island
> discoveries intriguing. "These reservoirs are refilling with oil,"
> acknowledges David Sibley, a Chevron Corp. geologist who has monitored the
> work at Eugene Island.
>
> Mr. Sibley cautions, however, that much research remains to be done on the
> source of that oil. "At this point, it's not black and white. It's gray,"
> he says.
>
> Although the world has been drilling for oil for generations, little is
> known about the nature of the resource or the underground activities that
> led to its creation. And because even conservative estimates say known oil
> reserves will last 40 years or more, most big oil companies haven't
> concerned themselves much with hunting for deep sources like the reservoirs
> scientists believe may exist under Eugene Island.
>
> Economics never hindered the theorists, however. One, Thomas Gold, a
> respected astronomer and professor emeritus at Cornell University in
> Ithaca, N.Y., has held for years that oil is actually a renewable,
> primordial syrup continually manufactured by the Earth under ultrahot
> conditions and tremendous pressures. As this substance migrates toward the
> surface, it is attacked by bacteria, making it appear to have an organic
> origin dating back to the dinosaurs, he says.
> While many scientists discount Prof. Gold's theory as unproved, "it made a
> believer out of me," says Robert Hefner, chairman of Seven Seas Petroleum
> Inc., a Houston firm that specializes in ultradeep drilling and has worked
> with the professor on his experiments. Seven Seas continues to use
> "conventional" methods in seeking reserves, though the halls of the company
> often ring with dissent. "My boss and I yell at each other all the time
> about these theories," says Russ Cunningham, a geologist and exploration
> manager for Seven Seas who isn't sold on Prof. Gold's ideas.
>
> Energy Vacuum
>
> Knowing that clever theories don't fill the gas tank, Roger Anderson, an
> oceanographer and executive director of Columbia University's Energy
> Research Center in New York, proposed studying the behavior of oil in a
> reservoir in hopes of finding a new way to help companies vacuum up what
> their drilling was leaving behind.
>
> He focused on Eugene Island, a kidney-shaped subsurface mountain that
> slopes steeply into the Gulf depths. About 80 miles off the Louisiana
> coast, the underwater landscape surrounding Eugene Island is otherworldly,
> cut with deep fissures and faults that spontaneously belch gas and oil. In
> 1985, as he stood on the deck of a shrimp boat towing an oil-sniffing
> contraption through the area, Dr. Anderson pondered Eugene Island's strange
> history. "Migrating oil and anomalous production. I sort of linked the two
> ideas together," he says.
> Five years later, the U.S. Department of Energy ponied up $10 million to
> investigate the Eugene Island geologic formation, and especially the oddly
> behaving field at its crest. A consortium of companies leasing chunks of
> the formation, including such giants as Chevron, Exxon Corp. and Texaco
> Corp., matched the federal grant.
>
> Time and Space
>
> The Eugene Island researchers began their investigation about the same time
> that 3-D seismic technology was introduced to the oil business, allowing
> geologists to see promising reservoirs as a cavern in the ground rather
> than as a line on a piece of paper
> .
> Taking the technology one step further, Dr. Anderson used a powerful
> computer to stack 3-D images of Eugene Island on top of one another. That
> resulted in a 4-D image, showing not only the reservoir in three spatial
> dimensions, but showing also the movement of its contents over time as
> PennzEnergy siphoned out oil.
>
> What Dr. Anderson noticed as he played his time-lapse model was how much
> oil PennzEnergy had missed over the years. The remaining crude, surrounded
> by water and wobbling like giant globs of Jell-O in the computer model,
> gave PennzEnergy new targets as it reworked Eugene Island.
>
> What captivated scientists, though, was a deep fault in the bottom corner
> of the computer scan that was gushing oil like a garden hose. "We could see
> the stream," Dr. Anderson says. "It wasn't even debated that it was
> happening."
>
> Woods Hole's Dr. Whelan, invited by Dr. Anderson to join the Eugene Island
> investigation, postulated that superheated methane gas -- a compound that
> is able to absorb vast amounts of oil -- was carrying crude from a deep
> source below. The age of the crude pushed through the stream, and its
> hotter temperature helped support that theory. The scientists decided to
> drill into the fault.
>
> Unlucky Strike
>
> As prospectors, the scientists were fairly lucky. As researchers they
> weren't. The first well they drilled hit natural gas, a pocket so
> pressurized "that it scared us," Dr. Anderson says; that well is still
> producing. The second stab, however, collapsed the fault. "Some oil flowed.
> I have 15 gallons of it in my closet," Dr. Anderson says. But it wasn't
> successful enough to advance Dr. Whelan's theory.
>
> A third well was drilled at a spot on an adjacent lease, where the fault
> disappeared from seismic view. The researchers missed the stream but hit a
> fair-size reservoir, one that is still producing.
>
> It was here, in 1995, that the scientists ran out of grant money and
> PennzEnergy lost interest in continuing. "I'm not discounting the
> possibility that there is oil moving into these reservoirs," says William
> Van Wie, a PennzEnergy senior vice president. "I question only the rate."
>
> Dr. Whelan hasn't lost interest, however, and is seeking to investigate
> further the mysterious vents and seeps. While industry geologists have
> generally assumed such eruptions are merely cracks in a shallow oil
> reservoir, they aren't sure. Noting that many of the seeps are occurring in
> deep water, rather than in the relative shallows of the continental shelf,
> Dr. Whelan wonders if they may link a deeper source.
>
> This summer, a tiny submarine chartered by a Louisiana State University
> researcher will attempt to install a series of measuring devices on vents
> near the Eugene Island property. Dr. Whelan hopes this will give her some
> idea of how quickly Eugene Island is refilling. "We need to know if we're
> talking years or if we're talking hundreds of thousands of years," she says.