GEOL 115: The Earth’s Energy Resources

We finished talking about clastic petroleum reservoirs. We looked at some of the sand bodies that con be produced by turbidity currents (these are the undersea debris flows that we looked at last time).
Carbonate rocks may also make good reservoirs. These are rocks composed of calcium and magnesium carbonate minerals such as calcite […]

We started this class by looking at some plate tectonic reconstructions. THere are a number of these on the web that you can look at and one of the better ones is here.
We then talked about clastic reservoirs. Let us first define the term clastic.
clastic- a term used to describe rocks composed of […]

In this lecture we learned about reservoirs.  Reservoirs are the rocks from which we retrieve petroleum and natural gas. The term reservoir is based on economics and rock properties; different rocks can surrender oil and gas at different rates but a rock is a reservoir only if you can make an economic oil well by […]

The great bulk of organic matter in living things doesn’t contribute to the generation of fossil fuels. Most of the mass of living aquatic organisms comprises proteins and labile (easily changed) carbohydrates. After the organism dies those things get eaten and converted back to carbon dioxide.  Even land plants which are rich in cellulose and […]

If you are looking for energy resources you need to find thick sections of sedimentary rock. That’s a gross oversimplification. But its worth remembering that oil, gas, coal, and many of the largest types of uranium deposits are confined to thick accumulations of sedimentary rocks.  We will discuss why we need thick sections […]

Today we tried to cover geology
The Earth is a layered planet with a crust, mantle, outer core and inner core. We can access only the outermost portions of the crust (the deepest commercial oil and gas wells are about 10 km deep, whereas the crust is 5-50 km thick). We’re able to figure […]

Now we know what compounds are present in natural gas and crude oil.  Crude oil is a complex solution that can exhibit considerable variability in its composition.  It would be useful if there were a quick way of evaluating the composition of crude oil.  There is a parameter that can do this; it is called […]

First the isobutane challenge!
The boiling point of n-butane is -0.5oC whereas the boiling point of isobutane is -11.6oC. As I predicted isobutane has the lower boiling point.
We examined the solutions that are natural gas and oil. Although both of these solutions are largely composed of carbon (by weight) when viewed in terms of […]

We began the class by reviewing the thermodynamics that were covered last week.
It is important to remember that entropy is a measure of the extent to which the energy in a system is unavailable; it is energy that has lost the ability to do work.
Entropy is, therefore the thermodynamic quantity that determines the quality of […]

On Friday we turned to thermodynamics. We established that we use energy to do work and to heat things up (for the most part we do work by heating something up). We also spent some time considering the units of energy. Our purpose is not to become physicists or engineers but to 1)develop a vocabulary […]