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?

It doesn't have to be "at least forever uneconomical". If it were to happen now for a period of a few years (~20?), renewable energy sources would skyrocket, making oil on large scale obsolete. — Martijn, Jun 10 '16 at 13:04
What about some pseudobiologycal way to polymerize it? It would turn oil fields into solid blocks of plastic and they could only be mined like solid goods. — mg30rg, Jun 10 '16 at 14:08
I feel as if it would be easier for them to just pump up the oil themselves and store it in a secret location... — Waterlimon, Jun 10 '16 at 14:13
You do realize that pisoning an entire well requires unrestricted access to said well, as well as ridiculously large amounts of chemicals. Not to mention that some pockets of oil are only tapped into using pumps, or even oil rigs. How would you poison those? — AndreiROM, Jun 10 '16 at 14:42
You may find inspiration from Ice 9, which was created by a fictitious scientist in Kurt Vonnegut's novel Cat's Cradle. — Lumberjack, Jun 10 '16 at 15:23
Throw in some olivine, one of the most abundant minerals, and the co2 produced by bacteria is mineralized. After time you have a co2 rock instead of an oil field. — Josh Vander Hook, Jun 10 '16 at 15:27
"Poisoning" a well... or 10... or 100... or even 1000... wouldn't make a dent in the oil supply. The Bakken formation, for example, is 200,000 sq miles in size, and thats just one of several such areas in the US. — GrandmasterB, Jun 10 '16 at 16:12
It occurs to me that I don't really want to help develop this idea at all. — The Nate, Jun 10 '16 at 19:09
What if OP is actually planning on doing this but WB is the only non-suspicious place to ask how? 0.0 — Dessa Simpson, Jun 10 '16 at 20:10
"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. — Ber, Jun 11 '16 at 16:47
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. — Ber, Jun 11 '16 at 16:50
Actually, the idea of those ecoterrorists using something that's extremely detriminal to the environment (like releasing oil-eating bacteria that would release carbon dioxide or sulphuric acid from the oil) would make for a great story. Best of all, it would mean that you'd avoid any environmental messages - everyone can agree that those people are completely insane and no matter their "good intentions", must be stopped. — Luaan, Jun 13 '16 at 13:38
@VirtualDXS If your suspicion is true the OP will learn that this idea is extremely expensive and highly impractical if not downright impossible to execute. — O.M.Y., Jun 13 '16 at 13:58
Is it just me or do there seem to be a lot of duplicated answers below? Radiation & bacteria seem to be the dominant themes. — O.M.Y., Jun 13 '16 at 13:58
Because we still require Oil we would just need to spend more money and more Co2 in advancing the drilling techniques to get to the non-poisoned fields. You can only conquer supply by minimizing demand (think on how drugs or weapons get traded) — BlueWizard, Jun 13 '16 at 15:44

score 61 · Answer 1 · edited Jun 10 '16 at 10:44

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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.

edited Jun 10 '16 at 10:44

ArtOfCode

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answered Jun 10 '16 at 08:53

Syndic

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Yeah, especially when ecoterrorist groups already often spread half-truths or lies about certain products and they do not need any evidence (such as radioactivity measurement) for the people to believe them. Come to think of it, hoax can be as dangerous to business as barell full of nuclear waste. – Tomáš Zato Jun 10 '16 at 11:27
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I think cleaning oil from radioactive elements would be ways easier than doing the same with water. For starters, water naturally circulates, so gathering it is a hard task itself. Also, heavy elements (or radioactive isotopes) can be filtered from any liquid by fractionated distillation - something what is already being done to crude oil in the process of making gas. – mg30rg Jun 10 '16 at 14:15
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To make filtering difficult (or even nearly impossible), you would want to contaminate the oil with new oil made of Carbon-14. This is radioactive with a half-life in the thousands of years, and standard chemical purification methods couldn't distinguish "good" oil molecules from the contaminant. (Carbon-14 is not as strongly radioactive as uranium or something, granted, but perhaps its enough to be scary.) – Maxander Jun 10 '16 at 15:33
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Crude Oil is already refined and filtered in complex and difficult ways before it reaches the consumer, this additional step would not be that hard. It is also easy to verify, pump a little gasoline into a container and run an Geiger counter over it, and buying a Geiger counter is like $20. This is much easier to do than to test your gasoline for lead content which requires a detailed chemical test. – sdrawkcabdear Jun 10 '16 at 15:48
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No, this will not work. 1) fossil fuels are already radioactive; everything stuck in the ground for millions of years are. The burning of coal releases more radioactive substances to the air than nuclear power does (because let latter actually keep their sh*t tight). The Deepwater Horizon spill dumped ~60 kg of uranium in the Gulf of Mexico with the oil. But since there are millions of tons of it in that same body of sea water already, no-one noticed a measly 60 kg over all the much more toxic, sticky crude. – MichaelK Jun 10 '16 at 17:46
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Yes, Greenpeace and other such scaremongers love the "radiation is an invisible scary killer that you cannot see, hear or smell before IT GIVES YOU CANCER AND ACUTE RADIATION SICKNESS!!!" trope. Reality however is diametrically opposite to this trope. Radiation is stupidly easy to detect and avoid. 3) The amount of radioactive materials you need to get hold of to get anywhere with this is.... shall we say call it "prohibitive" to this scheme. You need tons of the stuff to make an impact.

MichaelK

Jun 10 '16 at 17:50

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Also, Geiger counters aren't exactly rare. If this came up, they'd skyrocket to common if not legally mandated at the pump. – The Nate Jun 10 '16 at 19:07

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The problem I see with getting Carbon-14 oil, is the same reason it is desired. It is nearly impossible to separate it. – Frames Catherine White Jun 10 '16 at 19:15

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Plus, they'd probably kill themselves while grinding up the radioactive materials. Holding a (subcritical) sphere of plutonium is no big deal, but breathe in a little plutonium dust and you'll get sick quite quickly. – db48x Jun 11 '16 at 02:30

@MichaelKarnerfors: Do you have a source for that 60KG? That is a very useful statistic, unfortunately I cannot find a reputable source. Thanks. – dotancohen Jun 13 '16 at 11:44

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@dotancohen I'll try to get it for you tonight, along with a calculation of the amount of radioactive substances that already exist in the Gulf of Mexico. – MichaelK Jun 13 '16 at 11:47

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@dotancohen Sorry for the extreme delay. I finally found the reference. https://www.scribd.com/doc/49647149/Oil-Uranium-Final Do note though that Chris Busby is an infamous scaremonger. In this context, note that with 1300 kg of Uranium per cubic kilometers of sea water, and 2.4 million cubic kilometers of sea water in the Mexican Gulf, he is trying to say that 61 kg uranium in a body of water that contains ~3 000 000 000 kg uranium already, is so bad it requires "monitoring", which of course is silly. Sources: http://www.wise-uranium.org/rup.html and http://www.wise-uranium.org/rup.html – MichaelK Jun 26 '16 at 13:54

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@MichaelKarnerfors: Thank you, that is a surprisingly accessible and short read. The amount of scare-mongering on both sides of the industry is well known, that is why I try to get the facts from the sources themselves. – dotancohen Jun 26 '16 at 14:44

@dotancohen Oops! I fumbled one of the links. This is the intended one: http://www.physics.isu.edu/radinf/natural.htm That one, along with this... http://www.wise-uranium.org/rup.html ...is the source of the number 1 300 kg Uranium per cubic kilometer of sea water. – MichaelK Jun 26 '16 at 14:57

@MichaelK : Might that not depend strongly on the isotope? Uranium has a half-life of about 4.5 billion years. Long-lived fission products, e.g. reactor waste, may have a half-life of 400,000 year or so, making them 10,000 times more active per kilogram of material, so 1 kg of this material is equivalent to ten tonnes of uranium, and dumping 1000 kg into the wells is equivalent to ten THOUSAND tonnes of uranium, or 10 000 000 kg, equivalent to (roughly) 10,000 km^3 of sea water. And that's just the long-lived stuff, never mind the short-lived isotopes which could be easily 100x more – The_Sympathizer Sep 01 '19 at 00:26

active still. Also, regarding the terrorists getting killed, it's gonna take a fair bit of savvy I'd think if you're going to be able to pump all this down a wellhead esp. without getting caught and I'd imagine a large and well-connected organization. You can't just dump it in. – The_Sympathizer Sep 01 '19 at 00:27

So yeah, dump about a thousand kilos of stuff from nuclear power plants or raided waste dumps across several large oilfields and I think a "notice" would get taken. – The_Sympathizer Sep 01 '19 at 00:27

And given that even the shortest persistent isotopes have a half-life on the order of hundreds of years, there's plenty of time to introduce/"drip" material in gradually esp. when as said to be distributed over multiple oilfields, thus minimizing handling risk. – The_Sympathizer Sep 01 '19 at 00:29

You can easily make the activity of millions of cubic kilometers, thus significantly boosting the radioactivity of the entire world's oceans. This stuff is the worst pollutant ever created, even with existing stockpiles, the only reason it is so safe now is precisely because it is recognized as such and kept very securely immobilized and inaccessible. If by some way you can contrive a scenario to breach that security, then a lot becomes possible. – The_Sympathizer Sep 01 '19 at 00:32

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@The_Sympathizer I stopped reading halfway through the first comment because - sorry for being harsh - you got everything backwards. Half-live is "inversely* proportional to intensity. Long half-life = low intensity. And there is already uranium in crude oil. The Deepwater Horizon spill added about 60 kg or uranium to the Gulf of Mexico. But since sea water contains tons of the stuff per cubic mile anyway, no-one cares. The Japanese are even working on a method of "harvesting" uranium from sea water. – MichaelK Sep 01 '19 at 00:41

@MichaelK : That is exactly what I was saying. The shorter half-life means greater activity, so the isotopes with 10,000 times shorter half-life are 10,000 times more active (in terms of decays per unit time). Hence, reactor waste isotopes with half life around 450,000 years are 10,000 times more powerful than natural uranium with half life around 4.5 billion years, since the former is 10,000 times shorter meaning the nuclei are decaying 10,000 times faster. – The_Sympathizer Sep 01 '19 at 00:45

Natural uranium can be held in your hand without much trouble (just don't eat with the hand afterwards without washing b/c it is actually a chemical poison being a heavy metal). On the other hand, even being near a small chunk of fresh, spent, reactor fuel (which is very short-lived isotopes and I didn't even get that far) can get you a lethal dose - just see some of the stories from Chernobyl. – The_Sympathizer Sep 01 '19 at 00:52

Anything heavy used to poison the oil won't really matter as it will come out in the cracking towers anyway. You are effectively limited to stuff that can't be cracked out: hydrogen (as tritium--the thing they can't separate out at Fukushima) and carbon (as C-14.) Tritium is $30k per gram and all I'm finding for C-14 are microgram amounts. Your ecoterrorists can't afford them and would certainly get caught trying to buy up enough anyway. – Loren Pechtel Oct 22 '23 at 17:04

A big problem against this method would be that the information will just be suppressed, lied about, or buried under enough misinformation so that nothing will be done about it. It will take an unreasonable amount of irradiated oil before consumers would notice the effects of it in a reasonable time, and by then it would be far too late. – vinzzz001 Nov 01 '23 at 11:24

score 32 · Answer 2 · answered Jun 10 '16 at 14:47

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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.

answered Jun 10 '16 at 14:47

HopelessN00b

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How much volume of chemical do you need to gel any significant fraction of the world's oil reserves, though? Unless a small amount of this stuff can catalyse a huge amount of reaction without getting used up itself, I don't see how this is viable. Please expand your answer to clear that up, if possible. – Peter Cordes Jun 11 '16 at 03:02
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You don't have to polymerize all the oil. Only the oil near the pump. – celtschk Jun 11 '16 at 06:31
@celtschk "the pump"? There are thousands of pumps. Probably hundreds of thousands. – David Richerby Jun 11 '16 at 10:52
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@PeterCordes well, in point of fact, there is no viable way to block access to all the world's oil with just a little of something, because the world's proven oil reserves are into the trillions of gallons across tens of thousands of locations. It would be like blocking access to the world's water, or blocking out the sun. If you want to "poison" trillions of gallons of something that's located in in tens of thousands of locations all over the world, it's going to take a lot of "poison", yes. So the question itself is fairly impractical, but I don't think there's a more practical way. – HopelessN00b Jun 11 '16 at 11:19
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@HopelessN00b - could we make a massive distopian horror story where oil-eating bacteria that excrete an organogelator go rogue, and threaten the entire ecosystem? – user24000 Oct 15 '16 at 23:38
Current average oil fields are at a depth between 2500 and 5000 metres. Underground temperatures range from 100 to 180 degrees Celsius. Bacteria could not survive at such pressure and temperature. – FluidCode Oct 23 '23 at 16:58

score 24 · Answer 3 · edited Jun 12 '16 at 21:20

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.

The second half of this answer rambles on and doesn't answer the question. — March Ho, Jun 11 '16 at 00:01
@MarchHo that answers question well, because Q is under reality-check: To containment enough oil to matter, it would take a contaminate infrastructure almost as large as the pumping infrastructure - Reality-check results are oblivious negative for that Q. Although I like that radioactive variant, even if it is not feasibly, but at least it's last resort for ET. — MolbOrg, Jun 12 '16 at 01:30
The climate models are essentially correct. I agree that nuclear power is good, and CO2 capture seems to be a viable technology. It's cheaper than giving up fossil fuels, and much cheaper than worldwide crop failures (which is where we're headed). — Beta, Jun 12 '16 at 14:45

Cyrus · Answer 4 · 2016-06-10T15:11:02.773

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.

The nanites idea seems very attractive. Is there any reason an artificial or biological catalyst couldn't be used instead? — cinnamon18 supports Monica, Jun 10 '16 at 11:26
That was my first idea, but I couldn't figure out how to spread the catalyst. If it promoted a solidifying reaction, it would get stuck inside its own rubber lumps before being able to spread. On reflection, it wouldn't need to be nanoscale actually. Some kind of small ring shaped devices with catalyst on the inside surface might produce nice spaghetti strands of rubber and push themselves forward in the process, hopefully spreading all throughout the oil reservoir. — Cyrus, Jun 10 '16 at 11:38
The nanites section could be cut off, because of the tagging on the question. OP does not want sci-fi solutions. — Mindwin Remember Monica, Jun 10 '16 at 13:43

score 4 · Answer 5 · answered Jun 10 '16 at 13:03

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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!

answered Jun 10 '16 at 13:03

Barack Obama

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I think cleaning oil from radioactive elements would quite easy. Heavy elements (or radioactive isotopes) can be filtered from any liquid by fractionated distillation - something what is already being done to crude oil in the process of making gas. – mg30rg Jun 10 '16 at 14:19
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@mg30rg the difference in weight between C-14 and C-12 is below the usual differences (two neutrons vs several heavy atoms). – Davidmh Jun 10 '16 at 14:41
The mass difference between C-12 and C-14 is 14% (actually some insignificant amount less). – mg30rg Jun 10 '16 at 14:57
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Isotope-selection/separation is very expensive and difficult, to say nothing of the fact that governments tend to kill you when you try procure thousands of tonnes of radioactive isotopes. Additionally, this plan basically amounts to getting into the business of manufacturing oil, because what you are proposing is to manufacture oil from radioactive isotopes. No safety or plausibility issues there. This is a project that only the most ridiculous cartoon supervillians would consider. – HopelessN00b Jun 10 '16 at 15:31
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C14 is not potent -- it's a long-lived emitter, too weak to be easily detected on a GM counter and not particularly hazardous unless ingested. It would also be very hard to replace carbon in oil with it, for essentially the same reason it would be hard to separate the two. – Charles Jun 10 '16 at 20:15

score 4 · Answer 6 · answered Jun 10 '16 at 13:36

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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.

answered Jun 10 '16 at 13:36

talex

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Tell that to the miners of the Alberta oil sands.... – Thucydides Jun 10 '16 at 16:01
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@Thucydides I didn't say that it is impossible to extract. But it will be more expensive. If oil is buried deep enough it will be impossible to excavate it. – talex Jun 10 '16 at 16:19
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@Thucydides Well, actually, that's the exact problem with those oil fields. It's much harder and more expensive to extract oil from them than it is from a a giant pool of liquid under a desert in the Middle East. "Canada's Oil Reserves 2nd Only To Saudi Arabia" ... yet, in spite of that, it's very difficult to make money off of the reserves, because it costs so much. "Canada oil sands producers now lose money on every barrel." – HopelessN00b Jun 10 '16 at 16:28
Many of the techniques developed for tracking and oil shale production come from oil sand production, and there is cross fertilization the other way as well. The downward pressure on oil prices has led to a relentless squeezing of costs, and many of the oil sand producers are able to stay afloat at 40/bbl, well down from the extraction cost of 80/bbl of even a decade ago. While there is some minimum cost floor, I suspect that we haven't quite reached it yet. – Thucydides Jun 10 '16 at 18:59
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@HopelessN00b It's hard to make a profit now - but remove all their competition, and they'll make profit just fine. After all, those industries started to spring up when oil prices went high enough, and were quite profitable until the prices dropped like stone because of all the new sources of oil. All in all, poisoning the alternatives will only make everything more expensive for everyone without having any noticeable impact on the environment - kind of like most of the Green initiatives nowadays :D – Luaan Jun 13 '16 at 13:35
This was going to be my idea: a catalyst that promotes formation of long polymers. It is plausible but science fiction so people cant argue it would not work. – Willk Sep 01 '19 at 16:23

score 4 · Answer 7 · edited Apr 13 '17 at 12:52

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.

Note, the bacteria would have to be anaerobic (nitrogen-fixing?) to avoid releasing more CO2 but the catalyst would do the real work. Also you'd probably have to use gene-drive technology to spread the gelating enzyme to wild bacterial relatives. — Ber, Jun 11 '16 at 18:17
Basically you'd have to have the resources of a state. Such technologies might be useful in real life to make undersea methane-ice formations safe, however. Gene-drive technology exists now and is scarier than sci-fi. — Ber, Jun 11 '16 at 18:20
What do you mean by coal does not release as many lobbyists into the environment as do gas and oil? — gerrit, Jun 13 '16 at 10:07
"* Aliens in the movies always want our gold and oil, never coal or other stuff that humans find abundant and relatively worthless." -- except of course those aliens who want our relatively worthless* population and water. — O.M.Y., Jun 13 '16 at 13:00
"Basically you'd have to have the resources of a state." So... a typical Bond villain? Sounds like a Goldfinger plot to me! — Luaan, Jun 13 '16 at 13:32

score 3 · Answer 8 · answered Jun 10 '16 at 15:10

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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?

answered Jun 10 '16 at 15:10

Joe Curmudgeon

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For a commodity as critical as oil, if the companies just voluntarily ceased production, I'd expect that government would order them to restart or be nationalized. – Nate Eldredge Jun 10 '16 at 19:17
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Alternatively, in a state of perfect competition, other competitors will simply rise up to take their place. – March Ho Jun 10 '16 at 23:59
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@MarchHo Oil is not a state of perfect competition. It would take decades to build and deploy the infrastructure required to get production back up to present levels. – David Richerby Jun 11 '16 at 10:56
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This does not answer the question, it's a personal political opinion veiled in a thin layer of sarcasm. – pipe Jun 11 '16 at 13:43
@MarchHo To some extent sure; but ceasing production doesn't mean relinquishing drilling rights, and it's those oil fields that will be extremely difficult to replace. – Gene Oct 23 '23 at 20:35

AndyD273 · Answer 9 · 2016-06-13T13:42:12.317

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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.

edited Jun 13 '16 at 13:42

answered Jun 10 '16 at 18:13

AndyD273

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There's actually a fairly rich microbe ecosystem in many oil layers. The microbes move very slowly, a few meters a year at most, through the layers.. – TechZen Jun 10 '16 at 20:21
bacteria just get killed at those pressures.. u.u – CoffeDeveloper Jun 13 '16 at 08:41
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@DarioOO -- Sorry but most oil fields are less than 2 miles deep with the vast majority far closer to the surface. Remember oil is mostly decayed plants and bodies of once surface dwelling creatures (dinosaurs). Pressures at 2 miles are less than 5000 psi (the average pressure gradient is .433 psi/ft). Bacteria and other far more advanced life forms thrive in the Mariana Trench under eight tons psi pressure. – O.M.Y. Jun 13 '16 at 13:31
@DarioOO Also, the point wasn't the bacteria. That was just building off one of the examples of "bad ways to do it" from OPs question. The point is that there isn't really a plan so dumb that some group of people that will try it if they think it will reach their goals without to much work. – AndyD273 Jun 13 '16 at 13:38

cytsunny · Answer 10 · 2016-06-13T10:05:28.447

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.

score 2 · Answer 11 · answered Jun 12 '16 at 22:48

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.

score 1 · Answer 12 · answered Aug 31 '19 at 23:42

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.

lilHar · Answer 13 · 2023-10-22T00:26:47.837

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:

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.
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.
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.

score 1 · Answer 14 · answered Nov 01 '23 at 10:28

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!

score 1 · Answer 15 · answered Jun 13 '16 at 08:39

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?

score 1 · Answer 16 · answered Nov 28 '17 at 21:19

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.

score 0 · Answer 17 · answered Jun 26 '16 at 12:40

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!

score 0 · Answer 18 · answered Sep 04 '17 at 08:37

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.

score -1 · Answer 19 · answered Jun 10 '16 at 23:41

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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.

answered Jun 10 '16 at 23:41

N Rowe

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I don't think you understand how oil mining is done... oil reservoir isn't a huge cavern filled with oil, it's usually some sort of a permeable rock - more like a sponge filled with oil. Ever tried to stuff a sponge with sand? – Luaan Jun 13 '16 at 13:36
OPEC stands for the "Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries", therefor by definition "any OPEC country" must have oil fields. No sand for you! – O.M.Y. Jun 13 '16 at 13:45

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

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