NOT FAR from me lives a man who slouches out from behind his remote controlled garage door, pulls out his petrol-driven leaf blower, and chases all the errant leaves off his driveway.
It is not the motorbike howl of the leaf blower that
irks and bothers me.
It is not the fact that the leaves are simply left on the road
for a publicly funded street sweeper to clean up what is a privately generated
mess.
It is the fact that he is using petrol when a simple broom
will do. Hey big fellah! A rake was good enough for your Dad and Grand-dad.
Peoples: treat oil with more respect. It is an incredibly rare resource.
Brewing up in the Oil Kitchen
Pour some new motor oil into a jar at home and hold it up to
the light. Look carefully at it. You are looking at a very old and unique creation,
the remains of living creatures that were alive millions of years ago.
These tiny organisms were plankton and algae that bloomed in
the shallow prehistoric lakes and oceans between 300 million and 30 million
years ago. When they died, they formed an
organic mat on the muddy floor, and their fats and oils formed what we call
kerogen.
Oil will only happen if kerogen-soaked mud becomes rock, and
is covered by dried salt from evaporated oceans, or a rock blanket is folded
over it by movements in the Earth’s crust.
Once trapped by this cover, kerogen has to be cooked under
pressure by the Earth’s natural heat to become oil. But it has to be trapped between 7,000 and
15,000 feet.
Any lower and it is too hot.
The kerogen gets cooked into methane and drifts away. Any higher, and it isn’t hot enough. This zone is the oil window, the oil kitchen.
More Layers than a Baklava
The special circumstances that create oil must keep coming. The pressure that cooked the oil then forces it
upwards. But it can only reach us if the
kerogen-rich rock is permeable, and there are fissures and cracks in the rock
above to aid it on its way.
And then there has to be the right shaped, uncracked layer of
clay, stone or salt higher up. It must trap
the oil in a nice, cup shaped reservoir.
If that’s not there, the oil simply dissipates.
As you can see, oil is a geological freak of nature. There are only 600 places round the world
where it has been created.
What makes this unique resource extraordinarily valuable is
the energy it contains. The energy in
one barrel of oil is equal to the energy expended by five labourers working 12
hours a day for a year
So when we hold up that jar of motor oil to the light, and
see the amber glint, we would do well to remember how lucky we are to have it.
Oil is as rare as gold, but we do not treat it with
respect. Think about that next time you
see someone using petrol-driven leaf blower, instead of a rake.
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