Hobbies And Interests
Land Drilling
Land drilling is the traditional way to extract oil from the Earth, and involves drilling a well in the ground and pumping out liquid oil lying underneath. Land drilling is the cheapest way to extract oil. In fact, in many cases, oil producers do not even have to search for oil underneath the ground and instead place wells where oil seeps up from below, saving the oil producers even exploration costs. However, the world has only a limited number of land areas with oil reserves. Many areas, such as the continental United States, have largely depleted their land-based oil reserves. The limited amount of locations makes land drilling insufficient to meet the growing oil needs of the planet.
Sea Drilling
Sea drilling is essentially the same as land drilling, except it's done beneath bodies of water. When oil is found under water, oil companies extract it with a pump that sits on a floating platform. Sea drilling is inferior to land drilling for many reasons. The floating platforms and exploration costs make oil more expensive to extract. And, as the Deepwater Horizon disaster showed, offshore oil extraction carries environmental risks because spilled oil can spread across very large areas of water. However, with decreasing supplies of land-drilled oil, sea drilling has become an economically viable option. Sea wells extract liquid oil, which has lower extraction costs than other methods.
Tar Sands
Tar sands are an unconventional oil extraction method that has gained popularity in recent years as a potentially major source of oil. Tar sands, also known as oil sands or bituminous sands, are a dense, viscous mixture of sand, clay and tar. Canada and Venezuela have the largest sources of tar sands, with each having enough tar sands to equal the world's total of conventional liquid oil. These tar sands have only recently become economically viable because the process of separating the sand from the tar makes tar sand oil much more expensive than conventional oil. Tar sand extraction also has a greater environmental impact.
Shale Oil
Shale oil is another unconventional source of oil. Oil companies extract a substance known as kerogen that has mixed with sedimentary rocks. Kerogen is a different substance from the bitumen in tar sands. Although the process is expensive, oil companies can extract petroleum from these rocks. Like tar sands, the world has large amounts of shale oil, and as the cost of conventional oil rises due to scarcity, shale oil becomes more economically viable. Because shale oil requires the extraction of large amounts of surface rocks in addition to a refinement process, it has a larger environmental impact than conventional land wells.