Grifter wrote:Tanada wrote:The short answer is, no the oil and natural gas are pretty much stuck in those geological traps unless we break them out. There have always been and probably always will be natural seeps, places where something has cracked the trap and natural gas or petroleum is slowly being released on the surface. Think of it this way, if you are squeezing a bolwling ball from all directions you can crush it down to a smaller volume, but you need a huge pressure to do so. The petroleum and natural gas in those geological traps is already crushed by the weight of all the rock/soil/water between them and the surface. If there is a tiny crack they will find it and seep out, otherwise they will stay where they are.
Please correct me if I'm wrong. Man has never managed to compress solid or liquid. Only gas.
I promise you I'm not being a troll or anything. But are you saying that organic matter gets compressed as well as other stuff and that forms oil?
This is a common misperception and proof of how badly our education system is failing.
Gasses compress very easily, the molecules are far apart and squeezing them closer together is not very difficult.
Liquids are harder to compress because the molecules are already closer together, but for an example the ammount of water mass per liter at a 2000 meter ocean depth is significantly higher than the same volume at sea level. This happens because the water is compressed, the molecules are squeezed closer together due to the greater pressure. Mankind does this routinely, the compressed fluids in any hydraulic machinery you have seen working are one example, another is a water cutter, a machine that compresses ordinary water to huge pressure then shoots it out a tiny apeture to cut through solids like a hot knife through butter.
Solids are the hardest to compress, they are made of molecules that lock together instead of freely flowing past one another like those in liquids and gasses. There are places not far from where I live where erosion over the eons has moved mountains so that only the roots remain behind. In those locations you can find layer upon layer of rock that is just as solid as it is anyplace else on the surface, but the layers are repeatedly folded like a spagetti noodles that were twisted around when wet and then allowed to dry. The rock literally flows from pressure a few miles below the surface's you have walked on all your life. Because the pressure at those depths is from all directions at any one point the rock flows slowly instead of breaking, and as forces push it first one way and then another it folds over upon itself. Mankind does something similer on a much lower pressure scale, look up Pre-stressed Concrete.
Geological traps are simply places where a source rock, one that contains Petroleum or Natural Gas, is underneath a fold in an impermiable 'cap' rock which does not allow the resource to escape.
