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Anti oilfield movement

These guys "bomb" oil-fields with a detergent, rendering all world oil useless
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Oilfields are the source for gasoline, plastic and much of the worlds air water and ground pollution. The produce of oilfields is one of the major causes for war, and is what mostly fuels the battles.

The world is full of green peace like fanatics looking for a constructive way to violently achieve world peace.

So if they just soap up all the world's oilfields, using halfbaked technology developed by the end of 2012, maybe finally global peace would come.

The downside of course is that if this mindset is prevalent, within a few years you won't be able to connect to the internet.

pashute, Nov 12 2012

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       Excellent. The perfect pretext for building lots and lots of nuclear power plants!   

       [+]
8th of 7, Nov 12 2012
  

       Your not grocking the mindset.
pashute, Nov 12 2012
  

       That's right, currently we're chuckling quietly and gloating.
8th of 7, Nov 12 2012
  

       Two things. How is spreading soap on top of an oilfield going to interfere with pumping oil with/through enclosed structures?   

       Second, why would this work? As near as I can tell, soap in the gas-tank isn't particularly harmful, (except it may, emphasis on may) clog your fuel filter. I think all it would do would be to make refining more expensive and wasteful.
MechE, Nov 12 2012
  

       what exactly does the detergent do?
WcW, Nov 12 2012
  

       [marked-for-deletion] science, lack of.
FlyingToaster, Nov 12 2012
  

       // very energy inefficient … expend more energy than you got out of the oil //   

       Your species' current process of moving the oilfields from one place to another a little bit at a time seems to yield more energy than it uses …
8th of 7, Nov 12 2012
  

       So, the downside is that the world enters into an immediate oil crisis. Hundreds of millions die for lack of food, water and other such luxuries. Millions more die in the resulting wars. That'll show those capitalist food-eating, water- drinking pigs!   

       The upside is that this would not work. At least, it _would_ work, but only to the same extent as, say, dropping large amounts of dandelion seeds on oilfields would work.   

       I hesitate to say that this idea displays an absolute lack of thought in any direction, because it's always possible that [pashute] knows something mysterious about the effect of dumping soap around oilfields. Perhaps the soap kills whales, whose dead bodies then drift into the oil rigs.   

       Now that I have hesitated appropriately, I would like to say that this idea displays an absolute lack of thought in any direction.
MaxwellBuchanan, Nov 12 2012
  

       //Your not grocking the mindset.// Close enough. Give me some of that soap.
lurch, Nov 12 2012
  

       Oil + soap = grease.   

       This is obviously a hugely complex and subtle multi-level pun or indeed an allegory* relating the dependance of the Western democracies (as personified by the Greeks) on imported fossil fuels to the need for soveriegn governments to work together to clean up the environment.   

       Or then again, perhaps not.   

       *Might on close examination be a crocodile.
8th of 7, Nov 12 2012
  

       With small amounts of detergent:
"When you put a detergent or soap in an oil - like gasoline, it attaches to the oil & any water nearby - which liquid shampoo already has. As the concentration of detergent is increased in relation to water, the suspension thickens slowly until it's semi-solid jelly, and no more detergent can be dissolved into it." (From internet forum question by a guy who had shampoo poured into his gas tank)
  

       With large amounts of detergent:
...oil degrading bacteria are injected into the soil matrix... and the conditions for degredation are optimized by adding ... a detergent to desorb the hydrocarbons. (In-Situ Bioremediation of Oil Contaminated Soil - Practical Experiences from Denemark, eugris.info website)
pashute, Dec 04 2013
  

       So, repeating my point that you would have to inject the detergent into the well to do any good, it would basically turn the oilfield into something like the stuff coming from Canadian tar sands, extremely heavy crude. You may have noticed that said crude is being collected and refined. It only adds cost, and lowers the EROI, but not enough to prevent it from being used.
MechE, Dec 04 2013
  
      
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