Ancient Maps Are Unlocking The Secret To The World’s Hidden Oil ReservesThe former supercontinent of Pangaea holds the key to future oil discoveries.
By Adele Peters
2 minute Read
After decades of predictions that the world is close to peak oil, it’s pretty clear that isn’t true. Fracking, tar sands, and new offshore wells are all flowing freely. The oil industry continues to develop new exploration techniques–and one of the most popular right now is a little like putting together an ancient jigsaw puzzle.
A fascinating article from Quartz explains how oil companies are looking back 200 million years to Pangaea, the supercontinent that once made up all land on Earth. Brazil was once next to Nigeria; Washington, D.C., was once next to Western Sahara. And it turns out that if you discover oil somewhere–say, Ghana–there’s a very good chance that you’ll find more of it across the ocean in the spot that once was connected.
"Since oil had been found offshore from Morocco, it stood to reason, geologically speaking, that it must be present in Nova Scotia, too."
The Quartz article tells the story of the hunt for oil in Nova Scotia, where the government is desperate to climb out of ongoing economic depression–thanks in part to the fact that the province seemed to be running out of oil to drill. A local government official decided to do some new research based on the fact that offshore oil was discovered in Nova Scotia’s former neighbor, Morrocco.
Since oil had been found in the deep waters offshore from Morocco, MacMullin had heard from experts, it stood to reason, geologically speaking, that it must be present in Nova Scotia, too. The two were “analogs” of one another. By starting at the very birth of the conditions for the creation of hydrocarbons, they might locate Nova Scotia’s petroleum trove.
It’s not as simple as matching up continents on a map. Paleogeologists (aka “paleomagicians,” in the industry) also have to find more evidence that oil actually exists in a certain location. But starting with the puzzle of Pangaea has already led to several new discoveries: Oil in Brazil led to a new discovery in Angola, oil in Ghana led to a new discovery in French Guiana, and the list goes on.
In Nova Scotia, though the first new offshore well won’t be dug until later this year, the evidence is strong that there may be more oil deep at sea than in the entire province over the last half-century.
(more at link:
https://www.fastcompany.com/3040542/anc ... l-reserves )
------------
THE ANALOGS
How one man’s wild geological treasure hunt could set off a new great oil boomJanuary 06, 2015
Written by
Steve LeVine
HALIFAX, Canada—In 2007, Sandy MacMullin was sitting across from his boss, a deputy minister in Nova Scotia, on Canada’s east coast. They had struck a windfall—enough natural gas royalties to pay $500 to every man, woman and child in the province, with cash to spare.
But MacMullin and all else in the room also knew what few outside it wanted to face: Such bonanzas were about to end. After a string of failures, the oil industry had declared the province dry. In just five years, gas production would begin to plunge, and soon after that there would be almost no royalties at all. Already deep in debt after the decline of the province’s lifeblood cod, lobster and timber businesses, Nova Scotia would be in trouble.
“I want a plan,” MacMullin’s boss said.
What followed was an extraordinary journey in which MacMullin, a burly native of the province with a broad grin and blow-dried hair, sought to prove the experts wrong. Nova Scotia’s salvation, he was convinced, lay in the same place it had been—its offshore oilfields. Although the old wells were declared to have dried up, there still had to be reserves in places people had overlooked.
Today, BP and Shell are embarked on a combined $2 billion in spending to explore Nova Scotia’s waters anew. What lured them back were the fruits of an exceptional geological treasure hunt, led by MacMullin, which yielded estimates of 8 billion barrels of oil offshore—four times the volume produced in all previous drilling in the province as a whole.
Nobody will know if MacMullin’s labors have paid off until later this year, when the first well is spudded. And now, with oil prices plunging and companies scaling back their exploration, it could all be at risk—although both companies say they are carrying on regardless for now. But if there is oil and it is economic to extract, it could stop Nova Scotia’s decline and transform this quiet, mannerly and relatively isolated province of 940,000 people into the scene of a roiling new oil boom.
To begin with, however, all MacMullin had to go on was a hunch. To back it up, he would have to persuade his bosses to spend $15 million from spartan provincial funds on specialists with an extremely arcane skill: paleogeology, the painstaking reconstruction of the long-ago world.
“We could have sat and waited for the demise, but no one wanted that,” MacMullin said over breakfast in this tawdry port. “We had to do something.”
The birthplace of the continentsTwo hundred million years ago, a gigantic supercontinent, Pangaea, comprised all the land on Earth. Nova Scotia and Morocco, today separated by about 3,100 miles (5,000 km) of the Atlantic Ocean, were conjoined. And since oil had been found in the deep waters offshore from Morocco, MacMullin had heard from experts, it stood to reason, geologically speaking, that it must be present in Nova Scotia, too. The two were “analogs” of one another. By starting at the very birth of the conditions for the creation of hydrocarbons, they might locate Nova Scotia’s petroleum trove.
FOR BIZ STORY: Sandy MacMullin, executive director of the Petroleum Resources Branch for the Nova Scotia Department of Energy is seen with the Play Fairway Analysis atlas for the offshore of Nova Scotia, at the province's Department of Energy offices in Halifax Friday January 20, 2012. All of the data included in the hefty atlas, was produced at a cost of over $8 million dollars.
Sandy MacMullin is 55 years old, solid like the amateur hockey player he was for years, and a fitness fanatic, bicycling for 25 minutes every day to his office near the marina even in Halifax’s freezing winters. In college, he studied agricultural engineering, but he landed a trainee government job in oil reservoir analysis, and liked the work. Three decades later, he heads up Nova Scotia’s Petroleum Resources Branch, which makes him the government’s leading oilman.
In order to reverse the deeply held pessimism about Nova Scotia’s oil prospects, MacMullin had to demonstrate the potential for significant new discoveries. Given the dramatic industry exodus, it meant starting from scratch, and MacMullin did what politicians and bureaucrats typically recommend in a crisis—he commissioned a study.
NS-offshore.
Most of the wells up to now off Nova Scotia’s coast have been in shallow water. (Canada Nova Scotia Offshore Petroleum Board)
He contracted it to a group of retired BP scientists at a UK firm called RPS. Leading them was a Cypriot-born geologist named Hamish Wilson. Examining Nova Scotian history, Wilson noticed that the early drillers had worked almost entirely in extremely shallow water—400-500 feet (120-150m) deep. He also observed that, in their post-1986 run of bad luck, they had been relying almost wholly on 1970s seismic methods—tools that are rudimentary by today’s standards.
It was possible, RPS said, that something had been missed. Wilson’s proposal included going deeper—hunting for an entirely new oil province in 6,500 feet of water, reaching for much older geology, and using much more advanced exploration tools. Wilson’s model would reconstruct Nova Scotia through eight geological eras going back to the early Jurassic age, just as Pangaea was breaking up. Given how oil cooked up over time, that was where, if substantial undiscovered reserves existed, they would be found.
Such “analog exploration” is a current geologic rage among international oil companies. Along much of the north-south strip of geology underlying the Atlantic Ocean, oil explorers are noting where petroleum has already been found, and then, in a nod to Pangaea, looking for its analog in a place to which it was once fused, often thousands of miles away on another continent.
Pangaea is only the latest of numerous supercontinents in the earth’s history. At approximately 300-million- to 500-million-year intervals, for at least 3 billion years and perhaps longer, plate tectonics have created and broken up these land masses. Where they have left the conditions for the creation of hydrocarbons has been a matter of accident—a rare and specific sequence of geologic events.
“Analogs are a great tool of exploration. You get to know something. You can touch and feel.”
Numerous of those sequences happened in what is called the Atlantic Margin, a string of basins that links Europe, Africa and North and South America, following a path from Tierra del Fuego and the Cape of Good Hope in the South Atlantic to the northern waters off of Newfoundland, Greenland and the United Kingdom. Theoretically, you can drill anywhere on either side of these once-united continents and find oil or gas.
When American oil lobbyists advocate drilling offshore from Virginia, they are hoping to tap the geology of the Atlantic Margin. A rush of interest to drill offshore from Namibia (paywall) is the same play. In 2007, Tullow Oil made a discovery offshore from Ghana. From there, the UK-based company went straight across the Atlantic to French Guiana and, in 2011, found an oilfield called Zaedyus. After 20 billion barrels of oil were discovered in offshore Brazil, frenzied oil companies explored the opposing geology in deepwater Angola where, in 2012, they found petroleum in a play called Kwanza.
...
In the beginning: The Bahamas, 203 million years BC200 million years ago, Nova Scotians could see Morocco from their house. (copyrightexpired.com)
The British consultants became MacMullin’s partners in saving Nova Scotia. Wilson, whose father and both siblings were also geologists, was joined by three other BP veterans. Together, they set out to reconstruct the world starting a little over 200 million years ago. “We needed to put the continents back together,” Wilson said.
The time they were looking at was one when the united Nova Scotia and Morocco were situated near the present-day Caribbean. If a dinosaur were inclined to roam 300 or 400 miles, it could have walked from Halifax to Rabat. Balmy and leafy, Pangaea was in the throes of breaking up.
As the inexorable
currents of molten rock inside the earth slowly drove the continents apart, there was first cracking, followed by an explosion. Magma ejected violently.
Rifts opened in Pangaea corresponding roughly to the coastlines of present-day Canada and North Africa. Seawater flooded in. A coral reef the size and appearance of the Great Barrier Reef began to form—an ancestor of today’s Bahamas.
Over tens of millions of years, that water would broaden into the central Atlantic Ocean. But to begin with, it was shallow. It would evaporate in the tropical heat, then build up again before vanishing anew, resulting in a thickening salt plain. When the water was there, it supported the presence of billions of marine animals, both tiny and larger. In the dry periods, the animals died and became buried in mud and sand landslides. Gradually they merged into a gigantic mass of gunk—salt, dead organisms and sediment, all of it piling up in a gently subsiding basin.
For these organisms to transmogrify into an oilfield would require a fortunate sequence of events.
First, the muck of organisms, sand and mud had to harden into rock. Then it had to ferment, or “cook”, for tens of millions of years. This cooking would have happened in what’s called “source rock,” which is dense, like shale or sandstone. Source rock is the fundamental component of an oilfield, the kitchen for the creation of oil and gas.
But getting oil straight from source rock is difficult. The rock is too dense to allow for the easy extraction of embedded liquid molecules. Onshore and in shallow waters, oil companies use hydraulic fracturing or “fracking” techniques to blast cracks into source rock and release the oil, but fracking at the ocean depths where MacMullin and Wilson wanted to look is exceptionally difficult and expensive, and companies are only just starting to take it on.
So for the oil to be easily accessible, the next step it must take after “cooking” in the source rock is to naturally seep out and be captured within a larger, outside container—a reservoir. An oil reservoir is not like a gigantic tank or swimming pool: It’s just another mass of rock. But it has larger pores. Those pores are linked—they run more or less in a sequence that allows the oil or natural gas to be freely pumped from the ground.
Finally, the reservoir has to be self-contained: sealed off by something else, such as another kind of rock, or a cap of salt. If not, the hydrocarbons will leak away and be lost to the subterranean world.
Emergent marsh continues to form at the mouth of the Wax Lake Outlet since the early 1970's due to sediment inadvertently deposited by a 1940's Army Corps flood control project southwest of Morgan City, Louisiana April 20, 2011. When BP's Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded and sank in the Gulf of Mexico last April, killing 11 workers, authorities first reported that no crude was leaking into the ocean. They were wrong. One year on, oil from the largest spill in U.S. history clogs wetlands, pollutes the ocean and endangers wildlife, not to mention the toll it has inflicted on the coastal economies of Florida, Mississippi, Alabama and especially Louisiana. REUTERS/Sean Gardner
Take a stinking marsh, dry it, cover it, cook it, wait 15 million years. (Reuters/Sean Gardner)
So Wilson had to show that this chain had unfolded perfectly in Nova Scotia. None of the steps could be missed. For starters, his team had to discover how long the initial process had gone on—how long that narrow stretch of water between the future opposing continents was shallow. Then, what did the waters look like—were they clear and blue, like a Bahaman cove, or green, saline and malodorous like a Florida marsh? To create a soup of hydrocarbons, the conditions had to be anoxic and relatively stagnant—the water had to be a lagoon with restricted oxygen and circulation. The more stagnant the better.
And it had to have persisted that way for 10 or 15 million years. If the waters had been deep, open and agitated—or if they had been shallow and cut off, but for only a few million years—there was no reason to look any further for oil. The muck would not have fermented into hydrocarbons, and MacMullin would have to conceive another plan to save his province.
(more at link:
https://qz.com/318755/how-one-mans-wild ... -oil-boom/ )
On the Windhexe: ''An engineer could not have invented this,'' Winsness says. ''As an engineer, you don't try anything that's theoretically impossible.''