by ROCKMAN » Sat 22 Oct 2016, 23:01:14
Rod - Here are some similar perspectives:
"Imagine the island of Manhattan covered with 150 feet of crude oil – almost enough to drown the Statue of Liberty – or 1,000 football stadiums filled to the brim with black gold. That's a cubic mile of oil, or the amount of oil alone the world now consumes in a year, Ripudaman Malhotra told an audience Monday at Greentech Media's Greentech Innovations: End-to-End Electricity conference in New York.
And Malhotra, associate director of SRI International's Chemical Science and Technology Laboratory in Menlo Park, Calif., wants people to think of all the world's energy usage in terms of cubic miles of oil, or CMOs, because "That exercise will bring us face to face with the enormity of the challenge we are facing" in moving to a renewable energy future.
Including electricity generation, which takes up about 40 percent of the world's energy usage, and all other forms of energy, the world uses the equivalent of three cubic miles of oil per year, he said."
Now a different perspective. I'm sure everyone here knows there are no "lakes of oil" in the earth. Oil is in the pore spaces and fractures in the rocks. Now some very simplistic generalizations. Only 20% of the rock is pore space. So the volume of rock holding the oil would be 5 cubic miles. But only the pores contained only oil. But they don't...more like 2/3 is oil. Again gross generalizations.
So let's round it up to 7 cubic miles. Sounds like a lot, eh? But perspective again: assume that 1 billion bbls of global productyion came from Texas. And again grossly: oil is produced in the first 12,000' or so...about 2 miles.
So the area of Texas, if it contained that solid 7 cubic miles of oil, wouild cover 7/2 sq miles. So again let's round upwards and call it 4 sq miles.
Texas covers about 270,000 sq miles. So IF that entire cubic mile of oil were produced from a solid block of rocks in Texas it would be 0.002% of the area the state covers. Of course Texas only produces about 1/25 of the world's oil. So (again a very crude generalization) globally that volume of oil would be under about 0.0008% of the area of the known oil producing regions. And just for grins: about 0.000002% of the earth's land area.
The numbers don't really relate to the actual physical world of oil production but puts it into a more easily envisioned format. Of course I can't imagin how one would envision 0.000002% of the land area of the world. LOL.
And yes: its a slow night and I'm bored.