From the “What Energy Shortage” department…
The Italian energy company ENI has found an estimated 30 Trillion cubic foot natural gas field off the coast of Egypt.
I first heard this story on CNBC World financial news channel, so they get top billing:
http://www.cnbc.com/2015/08/30/eni-makes-huge-natural-gas-deposit-find-off-egypts-coast.html
Eni makes huge natural gas deposit find off Egypt’s coast
Italian energy group Eni said on Sunday it had discovered potentially one of the world’s largest natural-gas fields off the Egyptian coast, predicting the find could help meet Egypt’s gas needs for decades to come.
“According to the well and geophysical data available, the field could hold a potential of 30 trillion cubic feet of lean gas in place,” Eni said in a statement.
It said the discovery well was located off Egypt’s Mediterranean coastline at a depth of 1,450 metres (4,757 ft) with the prospective Zohr field covering an area of about 100 square kilometres (60 square miles).
Yes, 30 Trillion cubic feet.
[…]
The find follows other significant gas discoveries in the Mediterranean in recent years, including by Egypt’s neighbour Israel, which look certain to have a dramatic impact on energy supplies in both the Middle East and Europe.
So there’s a whole lot of gas in the neighborhood… Wonder what will be found when the whole Med. is explored…
I like what these folks call it:
Italy’s Eni Finds ‘Supergiant’ Natural Gas Field off Egypt
ROME — Aug 30, 2015, 5:47 PM ET
The Italian energy company Eni SpA announced Sunday it has discovered a “supergiant” natural gas field off Egypt, describing it as the “largest-ever” found in the Mediterranean Sea.
The news came a day after Eni CEO Claudio Descalzi met in Cairo with Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi, the Egyptian leader’s office said.
Eni said the discovery — made in its Zohr prospect “in the deep waters of Egypt” — could hold a potential 30 trillion cubic feet of gas over an area of 100 square kilometers (38.6 square miles).
The discovery well is 190 kilometers (about 120 miles) from the Egyptian coast, and is at a depth of 1,450 meters ( 4,757 feet) in the Shorouk Block, the company said. The block is about 107 kilometers (66 miles) from Port Said.
The deeper we go, the more we find. Clue Alert…
So England just discovered a load of fossil fuel. Now Egypt. Canada is soaked in the stuff. The USA has been so endowed that with a bit of fracking the cost has dropped to dirt cheap. Then Saudi opened the tap a bit because they were losing market share and plunged the price of a bbl of crude to under $40. Sure doesn’t sound like any energy shortage to me.
No wonder the folks running the Global Warming scam are trying to get fuels shut in. There’s just so much of it that they can’t keep the price up.
Musings from the Chiefio 
This will probably put a dent in Russia’s captive customers for natural gas in the eastern European area, once it is developed (not to mention their income stream).
At 120 miles out from the Egyptian coast, it should be in international waters as well, so depending on the details and international agreements which might be in place, others could tap that same field or nearby deposits I would think.
I wonder if Greece has seriously looked at off shore oil/gas exploration to solve their balance of payments problems?
The bad news is with so much gas available, will tapping this deposit lower prices so much that it puts some producers out of business? It is my understanding that Russia has been over producing on lots of its oil/gas wells for years now and they are suffering diminishing returns on some of their fields.
Our fracking natural gas output was looking to export markets and there was discussion of our selling lots of liquefied natural gas to Europe. It would presumably be cheaper to produce it right next door in the Med, although deep sea wells would be more costly than surface wells.
This could result in some big changes in oil/gas markets on top of recent fracking gains.
There seems to be a lot of gas everywhere. While not quite as easy to handle as liquid, gas powered vehicles are certainly practical and proven in fleet operations and industrial lift trucks.
If auto cost is set by hybrids & subsidised electrics, there is probably room for natural as powered vehicles to grow.
Thanks for this post.
It is great news, but empirically we know Earth accreted heterogeneously and the light-weight elements (H, He and C) were mostly added on top.
Here are links to 1971 and 1981 papers on radioactive age dating of Earth’s formation and early history:
Science 174, 1334-1336 (1971) https://www.researchgate.net/publication/6038377_The_Xenon_Record_of_Extinct _Radioactivities_in_the_Earth
Geochem. J. 15, 245-267 (1981) https://www.researchgate.net/publication/264846708_The_noble_gas_record_of_t he_terrestrial_planets
@Omanuel:
True on a VERY macro scale. But that was 4.5 Billion years or so ago. Plenty of time for heavier compounds to be broken down into lighter ones, and plenty of time for (for example) a half dozen cycles of the entire Mediterranean Sea to evaporate and reform. Which is why there are millions of tons of salt under the water… and under a heavier clay layer over it.
Similarly, there have been a couple of billion years of algae dying and depositing on the sea floor of various seas (many now evaporated) and for the entire ocean floor to have been subducted (several times) under the continents; that heavy basalt dragging down the lighter sediments and carbonates with it.
Then, those sediments and carbonates hit the magmatic hot layers and generate oils and light gasses… which is why CO2, H2O, CH4, etc. etc. come out of the bottoms of oceans and out of volcanoes.
So it isn’t all about the initial accretion state. Much is about the processing since then.
In particular, ‘water of hydration’ in rocks can be in heavy rocks, then cooked out as a light gas at depth… thus explosive volcanoes.
@Richard Ilfeld:
I’ve almost bought one a couple of times. Widely used here for airport vans, taxis, buses, etc. Only real problem with them is you lose 1/2 or more of your trunk (tank is bulky and added as an afterthought instead of designed in at the factory) and range is limited (rather like electric) as there are few fueling stations and range is short.
I found that by very careful route / stop planning you could make the L.A. to S.F. run, but decided not to buy that car anyway… A very nice Ford Luxury Crown Vic in Los Angeles for about $1200 at the time. That, and then Nat Gas was about 1/2 the price of gasoline per mile… But between PG&E being intrusive about buying gas (then) with requiring an account and a $9/month or some such minimum even if you didn’t buy anything, and the logistics of getting it from L.A. I decided I didn’t need another toy…
Then, for a while, you could get gov’t used Ford Escorts for cheap as Nat Gas was about $12 / unit… but just before I decided to buy one, fracking drove that down to about $3 /unit (and about 1/3 the cost of gasoline) and the cars jumped from $1000 to $3000 ish overnight… Sigh. Someday…
@Larry:
Egypt has said they intend it for their domestic market only. We’ll see how long that lasts once they smell the money waved under their noses…. But assuming it is true, it basically makes Egypt self sufficient. That means whoever currently sells gas to Egypt “has issues” and goods made in Egypt are easier to make and sell. (If the place were not a religious / political basket case I’d invest in it.) IMHO it will be all the ‘follow on’ exploration of The Med that will find lots more that will put the crimp on Russia and The Middle East.
Essentially it tells all the drillers “Go drill here, and drill deeper”; and they will find a lot more there as the Med has a common geologic / biologic history…
BTW, news today is Russia and Saudi talking with Venezuela and others about how to reduce production and “stabilize the
money feastmarket”… I think they are getting a little hungry for money now that revenues are off by 2/3 …@E.M. Smith
You are right. The gaseous decay-products of Pu-244 (fissiogenic Xe-136) and I-129 (radiogenic Xe-129) are still being carried to the surface in the high-purity CO2 that comes from the mantle and is used in New Mexico to make “Dry Ice,” as shown in the Science, and . . .
The CO2 may be from dissociation of subducted sedimentary rocks, but all of the noble gases are essentially free of the atmospheric-type noble gases, as shown in the Geochemistry J., that are abundantly incorporated into sediments, as shown in a paper by Robert Canalas (one of my earliest graduate students) in the 1960s.
The entire eastern Mediterranean appears to be a very rich gas field. This may be one of the reasons for the political instability as everyone wants to be ‘in charge’ when the money comes in. Germans wanted Greece to pay off debts with Aegean islands that just happen to be in potential gas and oil fields. See this from 2013 https://www.aei.org/publication/will-the-eastern-mediterranean-become-the-next-persian-gulf/ These new discoveries worldwide have totally altered the political energy balance. At the same time they have made unattractive countries suddenly everyone’s friend.
Some years ago I posted (somewhere…don’t remember where…I’ve slept since then) a comment that perhaps the abiotic oil hypothesis was true, and the AGW myth was developed to keep the price of so-called “fossil fuels” elevated.
@PowerGrab:
Riddle me this… Why does Al Jazeera, and oil kingdom owned network, promote Global Warming in their programming……
As always, follow the money…
I still think they keep trying to sell that CAGW lie to make the value of fossil fuel stocks plummet…so that they can snap them up at fire sale prices. Then what? Sit on them and let everyone else die off? Sit on them until it’s clear we’re heading into some flavor of ice age, and fossil fuel are the only way to stay alive, and their value skyrockets? Sit on them and only let their “friends” use them, while their “enemies” (the ones that made them rich in the first place!), go without? All of the above?
The world wide Agenda of the Communists to take over running the world is going into high gear;
http://www.wnd.com/2015/08/mega-agenda-21-resurrected-with-popes-help/
The push to shame or propel the world leaders into shackling their populations to the wheel of UN Elite Bureaucrats control of everything is shifting to overdrive…pg
Regretfully, p.g.sharrow, completely independent investigations arrive at the same conclusion:
Our political system, best academic institutions and most modern science are all controlled by followers of the propaganda artist that united nations and national academies of science worldwide on 24 Oct 1945 to form “Orwellian Ministries of Consensus Science and Politically Correct Thoughts“ – JOSEPH STALIN:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/281017812_STALIN'S_SCIENCE
Gorbachev, the last Communist Party Secretary, operates from his San Francisco base to continue the drive toward World wide socialism. Communists were not defeated with the collapse of the USSR. They just moved their head quarters to California.
The communists of the Catholic Church, Jesuits, have captured control of that church with their own, the new Pope.
The POTUS is a former registered communist and is now attempting to rule by decree.
We live in interesting times…pg
Yes, p.g.sharrow, and the current rate of economic collapse and impending crisis of immigrants means that even us older folks may see the conclusion.
One scene in the “collapse of communism” had a former movie star saying, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”
The next scene in the historical record shows the former President of the United States looking at the ruins of the former Berlin Wall, addressing an international TV audience, “The evil empire is gone!”
I was a gullible believer at the time.
@omanuel, Yes those that are older can remember a Free and vigorous America of our youth. Creeping move towards Police state has been slow enough that most that are younger or immigrant know nothing of the past when people actually had controlled over their own lives…pg
The Evil empire of the Soviet Union is gone and only a second world remnant, Russia is left. The evil monster created by Lenin and Stalin still lives and strives to gain it’s dominance over all. Control of The UN was captured by them in the mid 1950s. The UN is now a tool of the World Socialists and is certainly no friend of free people. ..pg
p.g.sharrow: There is an intriguing story regarding the concept of reality and its abrupt change at the end of WWII:
I to am now old and to my dismay science and politics has been a disappointment my whole life Thanks EM for always trying to tell it the way it is. Over the next couple of months some friends and I are running a scientific experiment that if successful will change completely all of science. Regards.
@Wayne Job:
Now that’s mysterious… If it involves time travel, and is a success, tell me last week so I can be there to watch it. :-)
If it blows up let me know not to come…
I also read not so long ago that Israel and its waters are on a huge gas field also.
What surprises me is that this is a “supergiant” field and yet it is only about six miles on a side. That’s nothing in the grand scale of things. How many other supergiant pockets could there be around the world, still as yet undiscovered. The Russians will not be pleased.
Intrexon is a biotech company that has engineered methanotropes to consume methane and spit out isobutanol at the equivalent of $11/ barrel of oil. They just signed a deal with Dominion Energy (one of largest natural gas producers in Marcellus/ Utica shales) to scale up pilot plants. Looks extremely promising. Isobutanol can 100% substitute for gasoline at 97% energy density without changing any infrastructure and without ethanol’s nasty hydrophilia. And it burns cleaner.
Oh, and they’ve engineered another methanotrope to consume methane and produce farnesene.
Now imagine what the implications of all that natural gas could be!
@p.g.sharrow
I admire your keen mind and want to ask you What’s Up?
See Jeff Condron’s blog: What’s Up? https://noconsensus.wordpress.com/2015/09/08/a-solution-to-success/
@JP Miller:
Making butanol with bacteria isn’t new. I mentioned it in:
and IIRC the first president of Israel had worked on the process to make butanol, acetone and some other stuff with bacteria prior to going off to Israel…
So those folks must have improved it to be making noise about it. Probably eliminated the side reactions that caused the older form to make 3 products in a ratio, only one of them being butanol…. Or maybe it’s the ‘consume methane’ part as I think the older bugs method used starches or cellulose as food…
At any rate, it’s an interesting tech, but one with a long history. (In some ways, as long as beer, or about 5000 years that we know of ;-)
@Omanuel:
There has always been a death wish group of humans who grasp for power over others and then use that let them die. Look at the 50,000 or so dead in one battle in the killing fields of W.W.I as a prime example.
Our conceite is just to think that now is any different and that “Our Leaders” are more moral and honest than those who ordered 50,000 to do die for a stupidity.
Nothing has changed. Government Official is still just another name for Evil Bastard who is happy to have you die if they become a little richer or have a tiny bit more power. Just that after a brief interlude of keeping them in check post Hitler / Stalin / Mao they have figured out to do an end run via the UN and “social manipulation” games.
@Paul Hanlon:
THE big issue is just that “available reserves” rise exponentially with price. Any time price rises, all sorts of “uneconomical to recover non-reserves” become “recoverable reserves”. There’s over a Trillion bbl worth of oil in the sands of the USA just waiting for a steady price over $80 / bbl or so. So how many “supergiant fields” mostly depends on “how high the price”… The Methane Clathrates alone are measured in may Trillions of CuFt of gas. Japan has demonstrated recovery, so now it is entirely a question of price. At US prices, they are zero clathrate reserves, at $15 to $20 / cuft it is many many Trillions cuft of reserves…
Hi chief, I have been travelling and only just read your reply. If what we are doing works you would be one of the first to know, I like your thought processes and you may be able to help us understand what we get. The 75% of the universe that is supposed to be missing is energy, we are playing with that we think. We have not started our last experiment yet, some electronic problems, but soon we should be up and running. [ we killed a half life in an isotope in two weeks last time] doing some different stuff this time. Regards
@Wayne Job:
Best of luck with it.
FWIW, I’ve been nursing a theory that everything is photons and all that exists in force is momentum.
Whack matter and you can spall off photons. Doesn’t seem to make any difference what matter it is… Some are called gamma rays, others x-rays, some just glow in the visible. Combine matter and antimatter and they turn entirely into photons.
So my thesis is that photons are in constant motion. Very tiny mass, but extraordinary velocity. That gives them momentum.
Now take that photon, and turn some of the linear momentum into angular momentum. Make that sucker spin, and it is spinning in a very tight space at C. You have conserved momentum, but converted it from linear to angular.
I contend that the spin is the source of gravity. It is the angular momentum of photons coupling to other photons just as a vortex in water pulls other like vortexes into it. (Only with space as the working fluid).
This would also explain several other aspects of the world. Like matter / anti-matter. Those are just particles of opposite spin photons. Mix them, the angular momenta cancel and light goes flying off in all directions at C linear. Similarly, shove electrons back and forth in a wire, and at some point some of their constituent photons will be spinning in just the right direction at just the right rate to be moving linear on the wire… and can then leave as ‘radio waves’ (that are actually just very low frequency photons) as their angular motion was canceled and turned into linear, then wacked into the end of the wire as the electron suddenly changed direction.
The implications of this are somewhat wide. For example, photons (and radio and x-rays and…) ought to be able to change decay rates if they can couple into the atoms / particles in question. Magnetic flux comes from a particular kind of ‘polarizing’ or imbalance of those rotating photons so the electro-magnetic effects show up as magnetic not electrical. This implies magnetic force can influence light formation, decay rates, and such.
Basically the idea opens up a new way of thinking about subatomic activity and perhaps that can lead to new ways to use it and change it. (Or it could just be a daft half baked idea and proven wrong after some testing and experimenting…)
Unfortunately, I think it also implies that anti-gravity is unlikely. If gravity comes from photons with high angular momentum ‘frame dragging’ space around them in a vortex, then the only way to stop it is to stop the rotation, and that then causes a bit of a bang and flash of light…
Sidebar On Big Bang:
This also, IMHO, explains the Big Bang. My thesis there is that we have a ‘steady state Big Bang’ in that as the universe ages, everything eventually goes down black holes. All the universe ends up sucked into singularities where space and time are, eventually, extinguished. But what happens then? Well, at ‘no time and no space’ you are at the white hole at the beginning of time and space. That was the Big Bang. When all the matter of the universe suddenly sprang into being. Essentially all the universe goes down the black hole drain and ‘time ends’, so it may accumulate in all those black holes over billions or trillions of years, yet at the point in the singularity where time and space are extinguished, all that matter IS at “the same place and time” in that it is in no-space and no-time.
But there was a loose end… WHY did we have all the gravity on our side of the black hole and WHY did the white hole of the big bang have all light and no gravity? (Or stuff could not come flying out of it…)
Well, IF (and it is a mighty big IF) gravity is the result of photons converting from linear momentum to angular momentum, that angular momentum requires space to exist for it to have meaning. At the point where ‘space and time end’, there is no frame of reference in which to have rotation. Essentially, a black hole converts apparent angular rotation into apparent linear motion of photons as ‘space’ ends. It also converts ‘arrival over all of time’ into ‘existence at the the same moment’ as time extinguishes and then reforms on the other side of the singularity.
Thus the Big Bang as all of the universe shows up as an intense linear photon burst that then condenses into mass as time and space burst into being and linear photons can start converting into rotating photons and condense as matter, bringing gravity into existence in the process. Said gravity eventually leading to black holes, sucking up all those rotating photons, and eventually having all their rotations cancel and sending them as linear into the White Hole at the start of time…
I think it may also explain the lack of anti-matter… We have mostly matter in the universe now simply due to slightly more of it not being sucked down into black holes in the early formation of galaxies. As particles form, they ought to be evenly divided normal / anti. BUT, gravity can form in non-uniform patches and as that happens, local distributions of matter / anti-matter can have differential accumulations into the black holes making up the cores of galaxies. Eventually you have a LOT of stuff in black holes (that dark mass of the universe) that is unequal in terms of matter / antimatter, but it doesn’t show up as all of it is ‘down the hole’ of the singularity and having the rotation squashed out of the photons anyway. The ‘last bit down the drain’ is the present visible matter of the universe, and it is differentially matter due to statistical chance events. (This does leave open the possibility that this varies by galaxy and that some might have anti-matter as the ‘left overs’ with a mostly matter back hole at the core. IF so, then some galaxy collisions ought to be really spectacular… or perhaps were a few dozen billion years ago and it’s now all moot / over).
At any rate, if any of that idea puddle is useful to you, feel free to play with it ;-)
Oh, I’d also speculate that E=MC^2 comes about due to the photons all doing C inside any M and in general kinetic energy = mV^2 /2 so there’s another loose end of ‘what multiplies it by 2’ to fit the general KE formula… but I’ve not pondered that speculation much…
@EMSmith; Looks like you are about to the same place I was about 10years ago. On gravity, at present it appears to me that gravity is the result of linear acceleration caused by electrostatic tension between matter and Aether. This creates warpage of the dielectric in the atomic structure. In this case gravity follows all the laws of energy and electric/magnetic fields.
As to black holes, it appears to me that they leak at the poles due to the magnetic fields spin-up as the singularity contracts. This is demonstrated by the “search light” effect we see in views of active feeding black holes. Excessive magnetic stirring would confuse the electrostatic fields that cause gravity so, there would be a condition of reduced gravity at the poles of a black hole.
It appears that Photons are 1 manifestation of the foundation stuff of the universe, Aether, so to say everything is made up of photons is correct, although one could say the same of Electrons, Neutrinos, Masons, and ons and ons.
Mass/inertia certainly does seem to be tied to the angular momentum contained within the atomic structure, but I think it is field strength effects on the surrounding Aether. Charge in motion seems to be the key. Change in the relative motion causes changes in apparent mass/inertia.
The “Big Bang” may be an “explosion of creation” in the chaos of Aether rather then an eruption from a singularity . The expansion of space may be an artifact of our present accepted theories of the physics involved. Far too many “constants”, fudge factors, in their equations for me. Any time I have to create a computer spread sheet with embeds that are unknown, I start with close enough “constants” that sort of work, to give me the expected outcome and then go back and figure out the real factors that the “constants” represent. When figuring out how GOD made the universe, reverse engineering is the method needed. We know what the answers are, it is the questions that we are unsure of! Ask the correct question will yield the correct answer…pg
Wayne Job says:
23 September 2015 at 9:23 am
Wayne, we look forward to your report of results. A reduction of half-life is a very important clue to the functions of the universe…pg
@P.G.: Well, wouldn’t be the last time I was a Decade Behind :-)
As long as I’m catching up I’m happy…