Quirks and Quarks

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Live Radio | CBC ListenAnd pick a city in the right time zone. The show is on at noon local time. So you can catch it over a 4 or so hour time span.This weeks topics:
HelloThis Week on Quirks & Quarks:Squeezing oil from a stone.With the price of oil reaching new heights this week, people are more worried than ever about running out of this scarce resource that fuels our modern societies. We all know that oil is a finite resource, made from the plants and animals of the ancient past. But what if we're all wrong? What if oil is actually produced geologically, and not biologically? Maverick scientist, the late Dr. Thomas Gold believed that an unlimited supply of oil could exist deep in the earth's crust, produced simply by squeezing rock and water. Now some new research indicates he could have been right.Plus - Bower bird bullies beat up their neighbour's bowers.All this and more on Quirks & Quarks, Saturday right after the noon news on Radio One.Bob McDonald
Host
You are currently signed-up for CBC.ca's Quirks newsletter.To unsubscribe, please send a blank e-mail to Quirks- unsubscribe@interact.cbc.ca. You will then receive an e-mail to confirm your request. Please follow the instructions in the confirmation e-mail to complete the unsubscribe process.If you are a CBC Online member, go to the "E-mail Newsletters" section of the website to make changes to your newsletter subscriptions.Copyright 2004 Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.This message has been edited by NosyNed, 01-12-2005 13:46 AM

Heh, yeah, there are some interesting oil finds out there. One of the ones most frequently cited is oil found in basement granite. However, it is important to note that such oil is found in *fractures* in the granite, so it very well could have migrated in from a now dry field. Unlike coal, oil moves around - sometimes, it even gets all the way to the surface on its own. Still, it's an interesting notion, and deserves some more study.One thing I need to talk to my father about is to ask him why gasoline prices have only gone up 20% or so, while crude prices have gone up 70% or so and US oil stocks - while higher than initially predicted - are still historically low. And why diesel has gone up so much more in comparison to gasoline.This message has been edited by Rei, 09-29-2004 12:50 PM

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"Illuminant light,
illuminate me."

Here (Canada) the cost of a litre of gas is about 25% basic oil input( according to a commentator on the radio this morn). So it oil doubled we'd expect an increase of about 25% in gas cost.You're 20% seems in line. I don't have any clue about the deisel discrepancy. I presume a different proportion of input and other costs.

How Gas Prices Work | HowStuffWorksThey claim 43% as of 2002 for the US, when crude was $24.09 per barrel. Now with current prices for crude around 50$, I can only expect it to be a much larger percent.Also, diesel is up by almost 40% - notably more than gasoline.

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"Illuminant light,
illuminate me."

Our gas prices are a far bit higher than yours. We are about 83 cdn or so cents per litre for regular. You are, I think, about 6x cdn cents.Our prices difference is heavily because of taxes I'm pretty sure. That means the basic input cost is a smaller percent of the total.Let me see, the NYTime this morning suggested you are getting back to about 1.93 per us gallon. That would be 51 cents US per liter.51 cents is .51 * 1/78 = 65 cents cdn per litreso if 25 % of ours is inputs that's .25 * .83 = 21 cents cdn per litreThat makes yours much higher at the old price. We are a net exporter so our crude costs might be lower but that is surprising. .43 of 65 cents is 28 cents a liter.

Ned,Bill Birkeland covered this issue a while back in the Black Gold thread.A quick snippet:

Yes, I know. I'm pretty sure that the oil from deep and non organic is wrong. I just thought that since the topic was going to be discussed some of us might like to hear it.
Q&Q is of pretty consistently high quality.

Hmm... Bill knows a lot more about this sort of stuff than me. However, I don't think he is correct on this one. If he'd join this thread, I'd have to ask him about some of the granite fields that exist in the world (noone thought to look much in granite before, but more fields keep producing). For example, a number of Vietnam's fields (say, White Tiger) are from drilling basement granite.Certainly one could claim that the oil is seeping in from other areas, but saying "only found in basins with organic-rich rocks suitable for the production of oil and gas" doesn't seem correct. Perhaps he could correct me on this one.

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"Illuminant light,
illuminate me."

quote:

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Hmm... Bill knows a lot more about this sort of stuff than me. However, I don't think he is correct on this one. If he'd join this thread, I'd have to ask him about some of the granite fields that exist in the world (noone thought to look much in granite before, but more fields keep producing). For example, a number of Vietnam's fields (say, White Tiger) are from drilling basement granite.

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Bill knows a lot more than me as well. If I remember correctly, you can find biomarkers in oil and trace them back to the organic layer that the oil originated from. That is, the characteristics of the nearest organic rich layer matches the oil found in the basement granite. If this is true for every oil well found in basement granite then I would think that an organic source is the best conclusion.

However, he said it was only found in basins with organic rocks. That doesn't seem to be true, unless he's defininng "in basins with organic rocks" differently than I would, seing as what traps the oil is cap rock over fractured granite.And I'm not so sure that all of the granite fields are close to known organic fields, either... I'd have to check into it.

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"Illuminant light,
illuminate me."

Now playing at Live Radio | CBC Listen#Pick number 8 right now, 11:12 EDT and numbers times zones west of that after this.

Live Radio | CBC Listenpick a city that is at noon local timeThis Week on Quirks & Quarks we dedicate the entire program to my favourite subject:"The Space Special."It's a big week for space exploration and discovery, as various missions head out to crash into a comet and settle on a Saturnian satellite. First off is NASA's Deep Impact mission, which launches this week. In six months time, it will slam into the orbiting ice ball and make a deep crater, giving us our first look inside a comet. Then the European Space Agency's Huygens probe will land on Titan, Saturn's biggest moon, for the first direct contact with the surface of a moon of another planet.Plus, we'll get the latest update data from the Mars rovers, and learn about a Canadian satellite that is studying the depletion of the ozone layer.All this and more on Quirks & Quarks, Saturday right after the noon news on Radio One.Bob McDonald
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see above posts for access:This week on Quirks and Quarks our feature item asks:"Is a little bit of poison good for you?"Some researchers say that we've over-regulated many toxic chemicals which, they claim, do no harm at low levels. And they may, in fact, do some good. Even very low doses of radiation might have some benefits. This idea, called hormesis, is gaining scientific credibility, but the data and the science are at the centre of a hot debate.Plus - the mighty spitting dwarf mistletoe ....All this and more on Quirks & Quarks, Saturday right after the noon news on Radio One.

See Flaubert's 'Madame Bovary' for indication that arsenic was used to make the skin look 'lovely'.
Do you know of other things?

Live Radio | CBC Listen#It is on from noon to one local time"Finding Fault with Flame Retardants."You might not know it, but they're everywhere in your house - in your couch, your mattress, your household electronics, your carpets, perhaps even in your kids' pajamas. They're a family of chemicals called flame retardants, and they slow down or prevent the progression of fire, giving people extra time to get out of a burning house. But they're also showing up in places where they don't belong: in your food, your water, in breast milk, and in the air you breathe. That has a lot of people concerned. The only problem is that scientists have no idea what levels are safe in humans - or if they even cause any harm at all. We look at the benefits versus the risks.Plus - using a slingshot to travel through space ...This message has been edited by NosyNed, 02-19-2005 13:39 AM