How do Oil pools form and why are they usually found in the arab countries?

Answer 1

Oil reservoirs are relatively deep zones of porous rock where oil is trapped. Pores are small empty spaces between the grains in rocks that below a certain depth are always filled with water or sometimes natural gas and oil. Oil typically forms in some sort of rock with a high organic content that has almost no pores or very small microscopic pores. The rock that oil comes from is often shale or some type of carbonate rock. As the oil is expelled from these rocks it migrates upward through water filled pores until it hits some barrier that keeps it from moving higher. This is often another layer of shale that overlies a sandstone. Thus the sandstone gradually, over thousands of years, becomes filled with oil, and the shale over the top of it forms the seal, or trap.

Oil happens to be found in the Middle East because that area was once part of a shallow tropical sea. Many of the reservoirs in the middle east are in ancient limestone reefs, and many are in sandstone. Saudi Arabia does have the largest known reserves of oil, but consider that the United States was once the world's largest oil exporter! In fact, the United States produced more oil than any other country in the world on an annual basis until about 1980. At one time the US had the second largest oil reserves in the world behind Saudi Arabia. The problem is the US has used it up. At present the US has about 29 billion barrels of known oil reserves, while Saudi Arabia has about 264 billion barrels remaining. The US in 2005 produced as much oil as both Canada and Mexico combined, and is still producing more oil each year than any individual country in the Middle East except for Saudi Arabia. Of all the oil used in the world in 2005, the US produced 8%, while Saudi Arabia produced 13.5% and Russian produced 12.1%. The US was the world's third largest oil producer last year!

Both Canada and Venezuela have very large reserves of non-conventional oil resources such as tar sands. If Canada's tar sands are considered, Canada has the second largest potential reserves of behind Saudi Arabia. Venezuela may have even more oil in the form of heavy oil (tar) than all the reserves of Saudi Arabia. The problem with tar sands is that at present they are mined, very much like coal is mined and must be heated and transformed from tar to oil, using large quantities of energy that is currently supplied by natural gas. In many places this tar is too deep to mine it, so methods of heating and melting it in place are being developed and tested. The tar sands are profitable at today's oil prices, but the long-term damage that may be caused by this mining is not really factored into that price.

It isn't really the Democrats behind the lack of production from oil shale in the western US. So far, Shell Oil is the only company that has *experimentally* produced oil from this shale. Exxon gave up after spending $1 Billion on research. Shell has patented their process, and is moving forward slowly and cautiously, as Shell is prone to do. It may be a decade or more before we really know if oil shale is going to be practical- and neither the Democrats, the Republicans, or any other politicians are behind stopping oil shale. Only profitability is stopping it from being developed, and Shell has plenty money to invest once they are convinced it will work.

BP Statistical Review of World Energy June 2006.
http://www.bp.com/multipleimagesection.do?categoryId=9009524&contentId=7017983

Answer 2

~Oil pools form on my garage floor.
Because of bad engine seals.
My car has never been in any Arab country. Neither has the North Slope, The Gulf of Mexico, The North Sea or Teapot Dome (which was greatly depleted when the republican administration of Warren Harding sold the navy reserves in California and Wyoming to Sinclair oil - for a fee in one of the greatest scandals in American history (sorry brittosm26 - the elephants are as corrupt as the donkeys, it's just that the donkeys tend to be more protective of the environment)).
Not to worry. Oil is a renewable resource. Start growing a lot of ferns and a dinosaur or two, bury them, apply pressure and heat and let cure for a few million years.

Answer 3

The crude oil found in oil reservoirs forms in the Earth's crust from the remains of living things. Crude oil is properly know as petroleum, and is a kind of fossil fuel. Scientific evidence indicates that millions of years of heat and pressure changed the remains of microscopic plant and animal remains into crude oil and natural gas.

they are not found only in Arab countries, or middle east. And not found in every arab countries too. Some middle east countries like Yemen do not have any.

More than 40,000 oil fields are scattered around the globe, on land and offshore. The largest are the Ghawar Field in Saudi Arabia and the Burgan Field in Kuwait, with more than 60 billion barrels (10 km³) estimated in each. Most oil fields are much smaller. According to the US Department of Energy (Energy Information Administration), as of 2003 the US alone had over 30,000 oil fields.

Countries like China, Brazil, India, Canada, Russia, etc have oil fields too.

Answer 4

There are two theories regarding the origins of oil/petroleum:

Abiogenic petroleum origin
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The hypothesis of abiogenic petroleum origin holds that petroleum was formed by primordial non-biological processes deep in the earth's crust and mantle. It contradicts the more widely-held view that petroleum is a fossil fuel produced from the buried remains of ancient living organisms. The French chemist Marcellin Berthelot and the Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleev proposed it in the nineteenth century, and saw a revival in the last half of the twentieth century by Russian and Ukrainian scientists.

The modern scientific consensus on abiogenic origin petroleum is that while there is evidence for it, most modern geologists do not support this for the vast majority of petroleum deposits within the Earth.[citation needed]

The deep biogenic petroleum theory proposes, mostly after the work of Thomas Gold, that the ‘’deep hot biosphere’’ may be the source of some petroleum alteration and for the observation of biomarkers in produced petroleum.

Other planets of the solar system or their moons have large amounts of methane and other hydrocarbons, presumably not of biological origin.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiogenic_petroleum_origin

Biogenic theory
Most geologists view crude oil, like coal and natural gas, as the product of compression and heating of ancient organic materials over geological time scales. According to this theory, it is formed from the decayed remains of prehistoric small marine animals and algae. (Terrestrial plants tend to form coal.) Over millennia this organic matter, mixed with mud, is buried under thick sedimentary layers of material. The resulting high levels of heat and pressure cause the remains to metamorphose, first into a waxy material known as kerogen, and then into liquid and gaseous hydrocarbons in a process known as catagenesis. Because hydrocarbons are less dense than the surrounding rock, these migrate upward through adjacent rock layers until they become trapped beneath impermeable rocks, within porous rocks called reservoirs. Concentration of hydrocarbons in a trap forms an oil field, from which the liquid can be extracted by drilling and pumping.

Geologists also refer to the "oil window". This is the temperature range that oil forms in--below the minimum temperature oil does not form, and above the maximum temperature natural gas forms instead. Though this corresponds to different depths for different locations around the world, a 'typical' depth for the oil window might be 4 - 6 km. Note that oil may be trapped at much shallower depths, even if it is not formed there. Three conditions must be present for oil reservoirs to form: a rich source rock, a migration conduit, and a trap (seal) that concentrates the hydrocarbons.

The reactions that produce oil and natural gas are often modeled as first order breakdown reactions, where kerogen breaks down to oil and natural gas by a large set of parallel reactions, and oil eventually breaks down to natural gas by another set of reactions.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petroleum

BTW, oil reserves are found all over the world. There just happens to be a lot in the area known as the Middle East.

Answer 5

oil is the decomposition of organic matter over a long peroid of time. (I think millions of years). It just happens that there's lots of oil in arab countries. The larges oil deposit ever found is in northern canada i think

Answer 6

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Answer 7

Actually the largest deposit in the world is shale oil and it is found here in the USA. Read up on it. The Democrats won't let us get it. It's in Utah and Colorado.....Mostly