China has very few shallow reserves, so they took my advice and drilled deep and, sure enough, found a cornucopia of hot deep oil.
the only thing rockdoc and his ilk want to do if they can't desuade drilling companies from getting the deep oil is to spend a wad of cash trying to find a sedimentary layer a few miles up so they can scream "this is where it came from". It serves no useful purpose at all - Its just money pissed away in a hopeless attempt to preserve a myth from the last century.
The more you blather here the dumber you appear to everyone on this site. It is baffling how you can quote papers that you never read and certainly did not understand and somehow use this to support your ridiculous unfounded theories.
First of all the diagram, you show with regards to oil and gas generation is a general one formulated many years ago. It has been demonstrated through kinetic experiments that generation and cracking is a product of both time and temperature. This was first published by Doug Waples back in 1981:
Waples, D.W., 1981. Time and Temperature in petroleum Formation: Application of Lopatins’ Method to Petroleum Exploration, AAPG Bull, 64 (6). DOI: 10.1306/2F9193D2-16CE-11D7-8645000102C1865DWhat that means is that if a basins history has oil situated at shallow depth for very long periods of time cracking can occur at lower temperatures, and alternatively, if the basin has undergone rapid burial (like the Tarim basin) then oil can persist to temperatures somewhat higher.
One of the deepest TVD oil fields in the world is at Tahe Field in the Tarim basin. The paper by Zhu et al which analyzed those oils and replicated burial history curves based on kinetic models demonstrates that oil preserved at depth there is consistent with current theory
Zhu. G et al, 2017. Non-cracked oil in the ultra-deep high-temperature reservoirs in the Tarim Basin, China. Marine and Petroleum Geology, 89, pp 252-262Thermal stability of liquid petroleum in the subsurface is closely linked to reservoir temperature. Most oil accumulations occur at temperatures <120 C. Oil cracks into gas at temperatures >150e160 C leading to the dominance of gas condensate and free gas accumulations in ultra-deep high-temperature reservoirs. The recently drilled Fuyuan-1 exploration well (northern Tarim basin) produced high-quality non-cracked single-phase (black) oil from a carbonate reservoir located at maximum depth 7711 m and temperature 172 C.This is the deepest oil discovery in China to date and among the deepest in the world. The oil density (0.825 g/cm3 at 20 C or API gravity 40 ), relatively low gas/oil ratio (135 m3/m3 or 758 scf/bbl), low variety and abundance of adamantanes as well as lack of thiaadamantanes and dibenzothiophenes indicate that the oil was expelled from a source rock at moderate thermal maturity and has not been cracked. The molecular and isotopic composition of oil-associated gases are consistent with this interpretation. We suggest that the oil remained uncracked because the residence time at temperatures >150-160 C was relatively short (<5 my based on 1D modeling) and apparently insufficient for cracking. We conclude that there is potential for finding unaltered liquid petroleum in other high-temperature reservoirs with rela-tively low geothermal gradient and recent burial in the Tarim basin and around the world.
Other comments from the paper of siginificance:
Based on their bulk and molecular composition (Tables 1 and 3; Fig. 6), crude oils from the Fuyuan field have maturity consistent with expulsion from source rocks at temperatures ~140 C and vitrinite reflectance 0.8e1% (middle-upper oil window).
All in all the paper points out that the deep oils in the Tarim basin are entirely consistent with an organic origin as predicted by kinetic models. In particular, the very rapid late stage burial resulted in concomitant rapid heating. Doug Waples paper of 2000
Waples, D,W., 2000. The kinetics of in-reservoir oil destruction and gas formation: constraints from experimental and empirical data, and from thermodynamics. Organic Geochemistry, 31, pp 553-575Outlines the kinetic model for oil generation and that model predicts that for heating rates encountered in the rapid burial of the Tarim basin oil can be preserved to ~185 C which is higher than the 172 C encountered in the Tahe oil field which means oil would be preserved to depths of around 8200 m. Again this is all consistent with an organic origin and the kinectics of oil and gas transformation. The idea that oils in the Tarim basin have an organic precursor is substantiated by numerous articles published over the last decade. A case in point is:
Xiao, Z et al, 2016. Source, oil charging history and filling pathways of the Ordovician carbonate reservoir in the Halahatang Oilfield, Tarim Basin, NW China. Marine and Petroleum Geology, 73, pp 59-71In which the authors state:
The majority of oil accumulations discovered to date originated from the Middle-Upper Ordovician carbonates, although a couple of oil samples were thought to derive from Cambrian-Lower Ordovician source rocks (Zhang et al., 2002; Mi et al., 2007; Li et al., 2010b, 2012; Yu et al., 2011; Li et al., 2012). Previous studies have shown that oils from the Halahatang Depression are similar to those of the Tahe oilfield and correlate well with the Middle-Upper Ordovician carbonate source rocks in that oilfield (Zhu et al., 2012; Chang et al., 2013a).
Finally it needs to be pointed out that when we talk about ultra-deep oil that has been discovered we are talking about temperatures in the range of 150 – 200 C whereas the temperature at the base of the lower crust is around 1200 C or about 3-4 times higher than the temperature that oil cracks instantaneously in a catalytic cracking unit. Anyone suggesting that oil can survive as a complex chain at those temperatures needs to revisit their thermodynamics.
I have no wish to debate this further, it is well established in the literature. I simply post this information for those interested to demonstrate that your argument is based on a complete misunderstanding of the science. You come back here each year and post the exact same stupidity and no matter how many times you are shown why your theories can't work you come back again repeating them. It is obvious you do not have the intelligence to learn from your mistakes and it is a complete waste of my time to once again correct you based on very simple basic science. I'd rather be fly fishing or playing golf.