long range question on oil drilling

[rurallib]

as we pull oil out of the ground we must be leaving huge nearly empty caverns below our surface. Will these empty caverns ever potentially collapse?
I think of coal mines collapsing, old auquifers collapsing. Is there a potential long range risk with all these empty caverns where oil once was? Or for that matter, exploding because of gasses within the caverns?

[DJ13]

1. There are some (controversial) studies that have shown

.....that once tapped out wells refill with oil eventually.

Dont tell the peak oil crowd, they dont believe it.

(Hence the controversial part...)

[lapfog_1]

3. Oil does flow between underground fields

The fields are really just oil permeable rock formations (limestone or other soft rocks), usually completely surrounded by harder rocks (a "cap rock" formation with limestone under the cap is what geologists look for in the search for new oil fields).

The "end" of a field is usually just rock that isn't quite so permeable. Of course oil will still seep in over time and "refill" an oil field or pool. That doesn't say squat about "peak oil" being wrong. In fact, one could postulate that the entire core of the earth is
one giant oil ball (and, of course, we know from physics that it isn't) and there would still
be a "Peak Oil" someday.

Not every oil field refills in this way. In fact, only a few have proven to "refill" at all.

And nowhere have I heard of an oil field which is depleted and "capped off" refilling to the point where it had as much oil in it as when it was first drilled.

Oil is a finite resource.

[lapfog_1]

2. Doesn't work that way

We aren't drilling into big pools of oil... not any more at least.

All of the oil we drill now in infused into rock formations, we have to pump water or steam or some combination of solvents into the rock to free the oil.

Even where there were pools of oil (sometimes under great pressure), there was always a hard "cap rock" over the deposit... so pumping out the oil still left a fairly stable geological structure intact, usually thousands of feet deep in the earth.

only very rarely did someone find oil like in the opening sequence of "Beverly Hillbillies" or similar.