Now I wonder how long it will take for some in Congress to block the drilling program.

Massive oil field found under Gulf

Reserves south of New Orleans could rival
North Slope, boosting U.S. supplies by 50%


Posted: September 5, 2006
11:57 a.m. Eastern


© 2006 WorldNetDaily.com


Oil-drilling platform in Gulf of Mexico
Chevron and two oil exploration companies announced the discovery of a giant oil reserve in the Gulf of Mexico that could boost the nation's supplies by as much as 50 percent and provide compelling evidence oil is a plentiful deep-earth product made naturally on a continuous basis.
Known as the Jack Field, the reserve – some 270 miles southwest of New Orleans – is estimated to hold as much as 15 billion barrels of oil.
Authors Jerome R. Corsi and Craig R. Smith say the giant find validates the key thesis of their book, "Black Gold Stranglehold: The Myth of Scarcity and the Politics of Oil," that oil did not come from the remains of ancient plant and animal life but is made naturally by the Earth.
"We have always rejected the theories that oil and natural gas are biological products," Corsi told WND. "Chevron's find in the Gulf of Mexico validates our argument that the Gulf is a huge resource for finding oil and natural gas."



The Wall Street Journal reports today the find could boost the nation's current reserves of 29.3 billion barrels by as much as 50 percent.
Chevron discovered the field by drilling the deepest to date in the Gulf of Mexico, down 28,175 feet in waters nearly 7,000 feet deep, some seven miles below the surface of the Earth.
The second biggest source of oil in the world is Mexico's giant Cantarell field in the Gulf of Mexico near the Yucatan Peninsula. It was discovered in 1976, supposedly after a fisherman named Cantarell reported an oil seep in Campeche Bay.
In March, Mexico announced the discovery of a field that could be larger than Cantarell, the Noxal field in the Gulf of Mexico off Veracruz.
In "Black Gold Stranglehold," Corsi and Smith argued the theory developed in the Soviet Union in the 1950s by Prof. Nikolai Kudryavtsev that oil is a deep-earth, abiotic product. The theory, the authors wrote, "rejected the contention that oil was formed from the remains of ancient plant and animal life that died millions of years ago. According to Kudryavtsev, oil had nothing to do with the unproved concept of a boggy primeval forest rotting into petroleum. The Soviet scientist ridiculed the idea that an ancient primeval morass of plant and animal remains was covered by sedimentary deposits over millions of years, compressed by millions of more years of heat and pressure."
Instead, the abiotic theory argued "oil should be seen as a primordial material that the earth forms and exudes on a continual basis."
Corsi and Smith directly challenge the "peak oil" theory advanced in 1956 by Shell Oil's M. King Hubbert.
In an interview with WND, Smith posed the following question: "If U.S. proven oil reserves can be increased by 50 percent with one deep-earth oil find in the Gulf of Mexico, who knows how much oil might be found as the technology of deep-water drilling advances and becomes even more economically feasible?"
In "Black Gold Stranglehold," Corsi and Smith note the importance of the abiotic theory:
The thought that oil might be naturally produced on a regular basis, that oil itself might be a renewable resource, is very threatening to those who have invested their minds into believing that oil is fossil fuel. The logical consequence of the fossil fuel theory of oil has always been that we will run out of oil. After all, there could only be a finite number of ancient forests available to rot into oil. Ancient forests, even if once plentiful, are a finite resource that by definition will become exhausted after they are fully explored and their oil harvested. The logic of the fossil fuel theory is that inevitably we will run out of oil.
Corsi and Smith note the power of the abiotic theory: "Could it be that oil is abundant, nearly an inexhaustible resource, if only we drill deep enough?"
Prior to the Jack Field discovery, the largest U.S. oil find in the Gulf of Mexico has been the Thunder Horse, about 125 miles southeast of New Orleans. British Petroleum holds a 75-percent interest with ExxonMobil to develop the Thunder Horse. This field, too, is deep-earth oil, with BP and ExxonMobil finding oil under one mile of water and five miles below the seabed.
Scientists believe Mexico's richest oil field complex was created when the prehistoric, massive Chicxulub meteor impacted the Earth.
"Could it be that the Chicxulub meteor deeply fractured the entire bedrock under the Gulf of Mexico?" Corsi asked in a WND interview. "If so, we might find abundant oil wherever we look as we begin to explore the deeper waters of the Gulf."
Earlier this year, Cuba announced plans to hire the communist Chinese to drill for oil some 45 miles off the shores of Florida. This move was made possible by the 1977 agreement under President Jimmy Carter that created for Cuba an "Exclusive Economic Zone" extending from the country's western tip to the north, virtually to Key West, Fla.
"If Cuba and communist China believe they too can find oil in the Gulf, we should pull out all stops," argues Smith. "We may be able to bring the price of gasoline down under two dollars a gallon if oil can be found in these huge quantities within our territorial waters. It's crazy to think we should be dependent on foreign oil when we've made Mexico our number two supplier of oil with the reserves Mexico has found in the Gulf."
"Thomas Gold should feel vindicated today," Corsi added, referring to the Cornell University astronomer who in 1998 published "The Deep Hot Biosphere: The Myth of Fossil Fuels," a book that also challenged the conventional wisdom on the origin of oil.
"As an astronomer reading spectrographs," Corsi noted, "Gold knew that hydrocarbon products such as methane are abundant in our solar system. Gold knew that the abundant methane on Titan, the giant moon of Saturn, did not get formed by little dinosaurs up on Titan, or by any other kind of biological material. So far as we know, nothing living has ever been found on Titan."



http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/ar...TICLE_ID=51837