﻿ The Exxon Valdez oil spill happened in Alaska in 1989.

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Bp had an even more oil spill in 2010.

That decline in whaling EROI and the gross amount of exploitable whale oil set the stage for exploiting a new energy source, and the then happened. Oil’s EROI and total exploitable energy made whales insignificant by comparison. In the 1930s, the EROI for East Texas oil wells was . Those days of easy oil are long gone. The global EROI of oil and gas production has fallen from about 30 in 1990 to less than 20 in 2014 and may decline to 10 by 2020. That means increasing amounts of energy are expended to extract the energy. Reports of increasing gross global energy extraction are misleading, as the more important measure is net energy acquired. At an EROI of two, half the energy acquired is used for extracting it. At a gross 100 barrels of oil extracted at an EROI of 100, 99 barrels are available for societal use. At a gross 100 barrels of oil and an EROI of two, only 50 barrels are available. Only about a third of an oilfield’s deposit is recoverable. Once a third of the oil is extracted, the energy surplus quickly falls to zero and it takes as much energy to extract the oil as is acquired, or stated another way, the EROI falls to one.

For the first concept presented above, for conventional renewable energy sources, they are replenished by sunlight or radiation from Earth’s interior; one is fusion, and the other is fission. For so-called non-renewable energy sources, such as hydrocarbons and fissile materials, they are either renewed on timescales so vast that they are effectively non-renewable for humans (such as ), or are “renewed” by the (fissile materials), so could only be renewed with new planetary formation. In mainstream thought, the currently non-renewable energy resources are primarily hydrocarbons (petroleum, coal, and natural gas) and uranium. Much of the debate centers around the definition of oil. What has been called oil for the past 150 years is today called . It is the oil formed by the , and can be mined by drilling wells and extracting it with the conventional methods that have been used since the beginning, and new techniques are periodically invented to increase the rate and total extraction. For conventional oil, humanity has unearthed about 1.1 trillion barrels since 1859, and about as of 2014. Production of conventional oil peaked in 2006 at 25 billion barrels per year and has declined since then. At current production rates, conventional oil will be completely depleted in less than 50 years. About another five billion barrels per year are called unconventional oil, which is called heavy oil, extra heavy oil, and oil sands. Those unconventional oils comprise trillions more barrels, and total and arguably more. For fissile materials, primarily uranium, the peak may have already been reached by 2014, or it . For , in that the peak may have already been reached, or it is only a few decades into the future at most. For coal, may also be only a few decades into the future. Peak extraction usually occurs when about half of the recoverable energy resource has been mined. In summary, the energy resources that have powered the Industrial Revolution are all on their way to largely vanishing in this century. The only resources with seeming viability past this century are coal and unconventional oil, which brings us to the second concept: .


Oil spills are dangerous for the environment.




Conclusion Of Oil Spills Free Essays - Free Essay …

Before the rise of humanity and industrial agriculture, the interplay of life, climate, and land masses created the that fed oceanic ecosystems. However, during the Cambrian Explosion the land was largely barren, as life had yet to significantly invade land. Also, have always been key hosts for oceanic ecosystems, as sunlight could reach the seafloor and nutrients were closer to the surface. When supercontinents broke apart or formed as the tectonic plates danced across Earth’s crust, shallow seas were often created, which were usually quite life-friendly. Those ancient shallow seas and swampy continental margins have great importance to today’s humanity, as our fossil fuels were usually created there. Earth’s were created in swampy floodplain conditions, usually near coasts, and the oil deposits were created by and that . The and its predecessors (, ) had a half-billion-year history that began in the Ediacaran, and the Tethys finally disappeared less than 20 mya. The shallow margins of those tropical oceans, and the anoxic events that dotted the eon of complex life, formed most of today’s oil deposits, and . Numerous shallow tropical seas .


In Paleocene oceans, sharks filled the empty niches left by aquatic reptiles, but it took coral reefs ten million years to begin to recover, . As Africa and India moved northward, the shrank, and in the late Paleocene and early Eocene, one of the last Tethyan anoxic events laid down Middle East oil, and the last Paleocene climate event is called the (“PETM”). The PETM has been the focus of a great deal of recent research because of its parallels to today’s industrial era, when carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are massively vented to the atmosphere, causing a warming atmosphere and acidifying oceans. The seafloor communities suffered a mass extinction and the PETM’s causes are uncertain, but the when the global ocean warmed sufficiently is a prominent hypothesis. Scientists also look to the usual suspects of volcanism, changes in oceanic circulation, and a bolide impact.

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Exxon Valdez oil spill - Wikipedia

Deepwater Horizon oil spill - Wikipedia


PHOTOS: Destructive Canada Oil Sands - Business Insider

The grew , and there were no more island barriers on the Tethys’s east end. The was finally squeezed out of existence by islands that became part of Eurasia. The shallow margins of the Tethys became the greatest oil source in Earth’s history. The and Paleo-Tethys oceans also formed oil deposits, but about initially formed during the Mesozoic’s anoxic events, primarily along the Tethys’s margins. In the Middle East, Caspian Sea, Western Russia, North Africa, Gulf of Mexico, and Venezuela virtually all of the oil deposits were laid down by dying and preserved organisms along Tethyan shores. In the early Triassic, along the west end of what became North America, oceanic plate subduction under continental plates that continue to this day. The foundations of the Sierra Nevada mountain range were formed then. I have spent .

Bp Oil Spill Globalization Essays - 1066 Words | Cram

The ecosystems may not have recovered from Olson’s Extinction of 270 mya, and at 260 mya came another mass extinction that is called the mid-Permian or extinction, or the , although a recent study found only one extinction event, in the mid-Capitanian. In the 1990s, the extinction was thought to result from falling sea levels. But the first of the two huge volcanic events coincided with the event, in . There can be several deadly outcomes of major volcanic events. As with an , massive volcanic events can block sunlight with the ash and create wintry conditions in the middle of summer. That alone can cause catastrophic conditions for life, but that is only one potential outcome of volcanism. What probably had far greater impact were the gases belched into the air. As oxygen levels crashed in the late Permian, there was also a huge carbon dioxide spike, as shown by , and the late-Permian volcanism is the near-unanimous choice as the primary reason. That would have helped create super-greenhouse conditions that perhaps came right on the heels of the volcanic winter. Not only would carbon dioxide vent from the mantle, as with all volcanism, but the late-Permian volcanism occurred beneath Ediacaran and Cambrian hydrocarbon deposits, which burned them and spewed even more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Not only that, great salt deposits from the Cambrian Period were also burned via the volcanism, which created hydrochloric acid clouds. Volcanoes also spew sulfur, which reacts with oxygen and water to form . The oceans around the volcanoes would have become acidic, and that fire-and-brimstone brew would have also showered the land. Not only that, but the warming initiated by the initial carbon dioxide spike could have then warmed up the oceans enough so that methane hydrates were liberated and create even more global warming. Such global warming apparently warmed the poles, which not only melted away the last ice caps and ended an ice age that had , but deciduous forests are in evidence at high latitudes. A 100-million-year Icehouse Earth period ended and a 200-million-year Greenhouse Earth period began, but the transition appears to have been chaotic, with wild swings in greenhouse gas levels and global temperatures. Warming the poles would have lessened the heat differential between the equator and poles and further diminished the lazy Panthalassic currents. The landlocked Paleo-Tethys and Tethys oceans, and perhaps even the Panthalassic Ocean, may have all become superheated and anoxic as the currents died. Huge also happened, which may have and led to ultraviolet light damage to land plants and animals. That was all on top of the oxygen crash. With the current state of research, all of the above events may have happened, in the greatest confluence of life-hostile conditions during the eon of complex life. A recent study suggests that the extinction event that ended the Permian may have lasted only 60,000 years or so. In 2001, a bolide event was proposed for the Permian extinction with great fanfare, but it does not appear to be related to the Permian extinction; the other dynamics would have been quite sufficient. The Permian extinction was the greatest catastrophe that Earth’s life experienced since the previous supercontinent existed in the .

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