Is there a way to "poison" oil fields permanently without releasing $CO_{2}$ from them?

Question

I have a group of eco-terrorists who want to limit the amount of $CO_{2}$ the world puts out drastically: by poisoning oil fields so that the oil becomes unuseable, or at least forever uneconomical to pump up.

Unfortunately, I haven't yet thought of a way to do this, not even with unrealistic wealth and technical capabilities. Burning it underground or having it "eaten" by bacteria or so would just output the $CO_{2}$ immediately. Injecting water into the field is used as a way to get more production out of it.

Injecting sulfur to make the quality of the oil low? We get sulfur from oil in the first place, so there is a way to get it out, and there will be a market for all that sulfur because there is an eco-terrorist group buying all of it...

I guess my best bet is another chemical that makes the oil too dangerous/uneconomical to use but can't be easily extracted from the oil. That exists in sufficient quantities to poison at least a small oil field.

Another option is to make the field inaccessible somehow, making it impossible to have wells there, but I don't know how.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

One way I can think of: Just look at Fukushima and how hard it is to filter radioactive elements out of water - I bet filtering them out of oil would not be any easier. Rather the opposite, I'd expect.

So the ecoterrorists could inject radioactive materials (maybe they stole used up fuel from a nuclear plant and ground it up?) into the oil field, arguing that the radiation won't hurt anyone... as long as it all stays deep underground.

Even if the oil companies came up with filters to remove the radioactive materials, the civilian population might not trust that the oil is safe to use now. Especially if someone were to spread rumors that the oil is still radioactive and the companies just bribe the controllers into giving them a clean stamp.

Answer 2

I imagine that the cheapest and most likely option would the use of phase-selective organogelators which are already used to clean up oil spills in some cases.

They're cheap, being based on sugars and alcohols, available in large enough quantities, aren't tightly controlled, make it much more difficult to pump up the oil in the first place, and are difficult to untangle from the oil once they're mixed. ("The recovery of oil from polymer gels is cumbersome").

Kind of surprising that no one's done this already, now that I think about it. Might be related to the fact that "gelling oil wells" isn't as exciting or useful in a propaganda reel as throwing Molotov cocktails at SUVs on a suburban car dealership lot.

Answer 3

You're working from a common misconception that 1) there is one substance called "oil" and 2) that it's all just sitting in natural tanks underground. Given this common misconception it would seem like you could just dump something into the "oil" in the "tank" and render it useless.

In fact, "oil" is comprised of a wide range of forms of hydrocarbons all of which exist in various types of geological matrices. The oil that gushes out in the classic Hollywood depiction is a mishmash of low-sulfur, low-viscosity, high-volatile hydrocarbons, in a shallow, highly porous layer of sedimentary rock which is pressurized by the degradation of the volatile elements into natural gas. Such oil has a very low "lifting cost" (which is why oil from the Gulf of Arabia is so relatively cheap) but trying to reverse the process would be nearly impossible.

Oil is spread out over not only vast areas but vast volumes. We also use billions of gallons of it a year. To contain enough oil to matter, it would take a contaminate infrastructure almost as large as the pumping infrastructure to even get close. The effort would cost billions and take years if not decades to implement.

In the meantime, there are lots of undeveloped oil fields out there that could be brought online in an emergency e.g. all the shallow water off-shore oil fields in North America blocked off not because of ecological reasons, but because of coastal property values. Those could be brought online faster than wells could be destroyed.

Given that the "Energy Crisis" of '73-'83 caused only Wage and Price controls, punitive taxation (which in turn enabled monopoly and embargo to cause a massive famine in Africa), several wars and likely killed 2-12 million people worldwide, and comprised the only multi-year period (including the Great Depression where the standard of living in the developed world went flat or actually decreased), I don't think anyone is going to stand around while the ecoterrorists progressively murder millions.

Seriously, most people simply have no clue how vast the energy infrastructure is. People who babble about us being "addicted" to oil are as idiotic as someone claiming we are all "addicted" to oxygen.

But they're going to learn. Nuclear power generates 20% of the US's electrical supply. The plants have a designed life time of 50 years max. We built our last plant in 1980; most were built in '65-'75. That means in four years, we either run the plants past their designed lifetime, or we start shutting them down. We will have to nearly triple our low-carbon emitting "alternate" energy scavenging system just to keep our power and carbon output where it is today. (Not counting the carbon debt we have incur to build low-carbon systems.)

Better hope the climate models are wrong, because otherwise we're screwed.

Answer 4

Given the expertise oil companies have in extracting, purifying and refining oil, you can assume that they will figure out a way to remove any poisoning from the oil once it's in a storage tank.

So, whatever your eco-terrorists use, it must have its effects before or during the extraction from the ground.

Chemicals

Highly corrosive chemicals could eat through metal pipes and pumps, but most likely would just cause a delay until new resistant coatings are applied to the pipes and pumping goes back to normal. There is also the matter of the quantities needed to prevent them being diluted too much.

A second, more complicated idea would be to enclose oxidizing agents in some kind of bubbles or membranes. They'd float around in the oil until the violence of the pumping ruptures the membranes, allowing the oil and oxidizers to get it on and explode, hopefully inside the pumping stations or underground pipes.

Bacteria

A mix of metal and plastic eating bacteria might work, but it's unlikely they would survive down in the oil field until they reach a pipe, unless they can metabolize oil (which is not what you want).

Nannites Catalyst Delivery System

With the right catalysts, the oil could be made to bond into a sticky, plastic-like mass. The difficulty is in getting enough catalyst into the oil field and preventing it from getting enclosed in said sticky mess.

If water is being pumped in to flush the oil out, that would be a good way to sabotage an existing oil field. Introduce the catalyst into the pumping water and walk away.

if nothing is being pumped down or there are no drilling sites yet, things get more complicated. A drone might be design to swim down through oil pipes (with the pump being stopped obviously) and spread the catalyst, but it couldn't cover an entire oil field by itself, hence my original idea to use a swarm of nannites.

To combine my ideas, the ultimate solution might be a strain of bacteria that produce the catalyst. They don't have to eat all of the oil, just enough to turn the rest into gooey plastics.

Answer 5

Pump a lot of mixed-weight hydrocarbons down the well where the carbon atoms are C-14 which is quite a potent beta emitter. The resulting oil would be too radioactive to handle and separation would be impossible.

For bonus points, the hydrogens could be Tritium!

Answer 6

Some chemicals or bacteria that turn oil into asphalt or bitumen should work. If oil is not liquid anymore it will be hard to extract.

Answer 7

Based on HopelessNoob's answer and the last bit of Cyrus's solution, genetically engineer oil-eating bacteria to produce an organogelating catalyst, then release them into the wild at an abandoned pump.

This will require the reservoir to not already be low-grade tar or shale oil of the kind that the US "environmentally friendly" politicians currently advocate using as an alternative to coal, as that already requires fracking and injecting caustic and toxic chemicals into the ground to get the gelled petroleum up, which similar procedures could be used here to counteract the bacterial threat. But it might convert a high-grade reservoir into low-grade that then requires fracking, given enough time.

(Fossil carbon naturally breaks down into low-grade bitumen and tar, which require heat and pressure beneath the earth to convert into high-grade oil that sits in reservoirs beneath mineral formation caps.)

"Economical" depends on oil supply. The closer they are to peak oil, the more attractive stuff like Bakken shale becomes. (It's a dirty little secret of the oil biz.) Are they at peak oil? How much oil is left? What is the demand like? If demand goes up with decreasing supply, it will be profitable for them to decontaminate the oil, like the US is currently paying Canada to do with its Tar Sands.

If a lot of oil is left, it will be uneconomical to contaminate it. A guy tried to do this with the world silver market in the 70s by buying up all the world's silver, and it did not work. (possibly inspired by Goldfinger...) it prompted a boom in silver production.

Coal is not as big a threat presumably because the burning of coal (on this world) does not release as many lobbyists into the environment as do gas and oil.

On another planet, they probably have a different energy economy, so this question is one of those "on a planet exactly like ours but..." solutions. Aliens in the movies always want our gold and oil, never coal or other stuff that humans find abundant and relatively worthless.

Answer 8

Nah, just buy the companies and stop production. That would be legal and ethical.

Of course, you'd also have to give up plastics and a whole bunch of other products.

So, even easier, why not just work towards a carbon tax? Or is that too hard because it requires getting people to agree, whereas unilateral action is easier to implement?

Answer 9

Poising oil field is impossible. Many answer here focus on what to inject, but the problem is not what to inject but how to inject.

No, I am not talking about the military force you need to break the defense. Just assume the ecoterrorists have enough military force to take whatever action they want.

You are able to poison the ocean because there is ocean current so the poison is automatically mixed well and spread. Some less fatal poison can also be spread by ocean creatures when they intake the poison (e.g. breathing, eating or simply stick on their body) and move around the ocean.

The oil underground may flow, but at least not the part of oil we can touch. We just open a hole from ground and suck the oil up. Worst still, crude oil is viscous liquid that it is hard to mix with other material. Even if there is a poison and you are able to get large enough amount, oil company can remove that poison by sucking up a certain amount of poisoned oil and the newly sucked oil will be clean.

I think a more realistic way is to constantly attack the oil drill so that the cost of defending the drill is higher than the benefit of selling oil from that drill, but there is no way to do it once and for all.

Answer 10

They could be incompetent or short sighted eco terrorists, and it doesn't matter that they use a method that would release a lot of co2.

"We destroyed the oil by pumping oil eating bacteria down! That'll stop them from pumping up the oil and producing more co2!"
"You moron, that'll just release all the co2 at once!"

There are enough idiots in the world that the idea that a small group of them working toward a cause with incomplete information is scarily believable.

Edit:
I should say that it's not about the bacteria. It could be fire, or nukes, or demonic summoning. The point is that no matter how bad a plan, or what the long term effects, some group of idiots will be dumb enough to try it if they think it's a shortcut to what they want.

Answer 11

How about VX? It was stockpiled by the US military for a while as an oily, long-lasting, area-denial chemical weapon. It also happens to be the most toxic substance ever synthesized. Your eco-terrorists wouldn't even necessarily need to get it in the ground. Just spread it around the well and it would be a nightmare to clean up. Should be significantly easier for your evil-doers to obtain or manufacture than radioactive materials.

Answer 12

Bacteria. Even random naturally occurring ones are a problem that petroleum engineers know well. They turn oil flowing freely through pores in rock into gels and goos that reduce or prevent flow.

Just think what a genetically engineered bacterium might do.

The most effective way to make sure both oil and coal stay underground would be to invent a better battery. Solar electricity is already cost competitive while the sun shines. Reduce the cost of storing it by an order of magnitude, and the oil age will be over within a few decades. "The stone age did not end because we ran out of stones". Who will burn oil or coal when electricity is universally cheaper?

Answer 13

Blow up oil rigs.

Oil rigs are big, expensive and take time to build. Blowing them up technically wouldn't "poison the wells", but it might set back the production of sea oil. And you'll be able to trade a cheap bomb (and martyr) for a lot off cash and time for the oil companies.

If the terrorists are really evil, and good at it, you could go after the oil engineers as well, killing people with that skill set. Get the colleges too, while you are at it.

Answer 14

Oil production is massively decentralized and as the price rises, it becomes economically viable in more and more places. New oil production is also often started in ecologically valuable areas; you don't want to encourage that. It's not the place to attack.

However, there are only 4300 oil tankers in the world, and a handful of main trunk oil pipelines. And there are only 700 refineries, which are big, expensive, and take a long time to build. If you took out 600 refineries, and then took out 100 of the first 200 replacements, you'd break the back of the energy industry and alternatives to oil would quickly become viable. (You'll need to do something about coal in parallel, but you asked about oil...)

Methods are pretty well described in other answers -- oil-gelling bacteria, radioactive contamination, standard industrial sabotage, plus things like nanobots, plastic- or steel-eating bacteria (that could cause widespread problems if it got loose), etc.

If I had to pay $500 three times a year to clean your bioengineered fungus out of my car's fuel system to keep it from stalling out, you'd better believe I'd buy an electric car, pronto. That's probably less fun to read about than poisoned oil wells, though.

Answer 15

Getting the at the oil while it's still in the ground is prohibitive. Granted, despite what you said, a bacteria could do it. There are bacteria that can survive at high pressures, there's already bacteria that eat oil, and bacteria can multiply quickly to where it wouldn't be an immediate result, but would be an eventual result given enough time.

The problem here is three-fold:

1. These type of resistance movements are rare and usually very small in number. (Most pro-environment people also believe in either pacifism or minimal violence). So they would not have the resources to genetically engineer the bacterium needed.
2. These types of activities that are active usually target immediate-result targets meant to cripple a war-supporting arms of an oil-based military-industrial complex supply lines, and avoid the negative PR that comes from hurting people and most oil wells comes with guards.
3. These rare people are usually lone-wolves who have just been pushed too far by resistance to improving the world's environment for some reason, and as such, their resources are only able to go after small targets like gas stations.

Also, there's another problem. You're using the word "terrorist", but having them attack infrastructure - not people. Terrorist activities are activities that have the goal of human death; they're meant to strike fear in a population (hence terrorism) and not merely a side-effect or non-event.

Actual Eco-terrorism is ridiculously rare and would be more like hunting down an Oil Baron or setting off a bomb at some fossil fuel convention/expo (which, in all fairness, would likely be much more effective, as CEOs are notoriously afraid of taking responsibility for their actions).

Further, as they're actively defending something (the environment and humanity's health) that was there first, aggressive political terms are not applicable, and generally require a defensive one to be accurate. Eco-"terrorists" would not exist without polluting industries.

Words like rebels, resistance movement, etc. are as such more accurate than terrorist.

So, our eco-rebels, targeting an active oil well is extremely far-fetched unless this is taking place in some alternate world. However, if that's the case, and there's some organization that's well funded and well supported and protecting of the planet comes at a greater moral ranking in their belief system than human life (such as AVALANCHE from Final Fantasy 7),then you may have something to work with.

So, assuming a fantasy organization with resources to oppose a military-industrial complex, there is a reasonable solution to "poisoning" oil wells.

First would be to develop a robotic mole without the restriction of requiring a feeder pipe behind it, something capable of tunneling down to oil reserves, so it can move along, seeding them with something to disrupt them. As an ecological organization, release of CO2 is antithetical to its goals, so this eco-terrorist group would not use a genetically engineered bacteria (which would release massive amounts of CO2). Instead, it'd use a genetically engineered archaea adding some of the DNA from oil-devouring bacteria, something that could survive at pressure, would be single-celled so as to help it move through the oil field, and could feed on the CO2 it generated to genetically designed to produce heat, oxygen, a non-oil carbon form (sugar, coal, diamonds, graphite, carbon nanostrings, Red #40, buckyballs, carbon nano-foam, etc.) - eventually solidifying an oil field and rendering it un-harvestable (carbon nanofoam would probably be the most effective). The mole could be fueled by by the oil (mildly ironic, but a small price to pay from their perspective), letting it run indefinitely according to its programming (restocking as Archea multply and re-fueling from the oil), and continue to seed areas whenever oil rigs are installed, permanently clogging the area around them and rendering them useless.

Answer 16

As a physicist, I immediately thought of poisoning oil with something radioactive but it has already been mentioned.

After some research, I was able to find a speculative idea that I'm not sure will work, but the material has the property of providing a large surface area that locks chemicals into it, effectively making them unusable. Worth considering?

These chemicals are called Metal-Organic Frameworks (MOFs). MOFs are compounds consisting of metal ions or clusters coordinated with organic ligands. They have an extremely high surface area and porosity. MOFs could be injected into the oil field. These MOFs could be engineered to have a high affinity for hydrocarbons, effectively "locking" them in place and making it uneconomical to extract the oil. However, the MOFs would need to be stable under the conditions found in the oil fields and should not be easily separated from the oil.

I found this and this nice references too. Hope this helps!

Answer 17

As a lot of people have pointed out, poisoning or altering the make up of oil underground may not be the best option. Nuking the area or leaving vx gases or other poisons lying around, while limiting the ability to drill is not exactly eco-friendly. Remember, your terrorists like the green grass and air we breathe.

Can I suggest you create some kind of plastic and rubber eating bacteria/nanotechnology. This should restrict the ability to use, bring in more equipment to drill holes and suck out the blackgold. Think of all the pressure valves and small intricate electrical wires that would be involved in the measuring of pressures, and depth etc.

Such bacteria/technology should be designed with a short shelf life of say 10-20years (you can always release more later if need be). It should also have some distance limiting feature so as not to spread further than intended.

If it is airborne, this may cause problems. Maybe require large concentrations to work in concert, so if it gets dispersed through the wind it will not destroy peaceful settlements downwind. There is also the chance that it might be inhaled if it is airborne, so you definitely don't want it to affect organic flesh. Just thinking of plastic microbeads, such a device/bacteria could also build up inside the bodies of organisms it encounters and work it's way up the foodchain. So I really don't recommend it being airborne.

That leaves it having to move by contact. This would also limit the distance it could spread. It would make potential cleanup easier. Unfortunately for man, we have a tendency to use plastic and rubber in nearly all our clean up tech and protective clothing. So...catch 22 there!

Answer 18

Your ecoterrorists should morph into a lobbying firm. Some 70% of oil (in the US) is used for either gasoline or heating oil. These are the uses which result in burning, hence CO2 generation. The terrorists seem to be fixated on CO2, so let's help solve their problem. They should push for legislation which forces cars to be electric. They should encourage hard carbon sequestration -- otherwise known as plastic.

They can still be naughty terrorists, because they'll use bribes and threats to get their agenda across. Everyone has fun.

Answer 19

Dump sand into the oil field. Easy to obtain, just start digging in any OPEC country where there isn't an oil field. Sand would make it incredibly hard to extract the oil without having to first move the sand. Only the most determined oil miners would get any use out of it.

Plus, sand is crazy easy to get. If you don't have sand, just use cat litter.

Could also use cement.