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Venezuela’s Black Gold · PlanetGeo: The Geology Podcast

0:02
SPEAKER_01: Welcome to Planet Geo, the podcast where we talk about our amazing planet, how it worked, and why it matters to you.
0:16
SPEAKER_01: Except for the funny accent.
0:18
SPEAKER_01: Uh, Dr.
0:19
SPEAKER_01: Professor Josh, I still have a hard time calling you Professor, Joshua Davis.
0:24
SPEAKER_01: Um, we are covering this is the first in a series.
0:28
SPEAKER_01: Well, I don't know, long-running series.
0:30
SPEAKER_01: We're gonna do an experiment here on geology news or news newsworthy geology topics.
0:35
SPEAKER_01: Probably maybe like once a month, you and me sit down, find something interesting to talk about.
0:40
SPEAKER_01: This month, we are January 2026.
0:45
SPEAKER_01: Um we're gonna stay out of politics, but let's just say it was easy to pick something interesting geologically to talk about.
0:52
SPEAKER_01: Is that an accurate statement, do you think?
0:55
SPEAKER_01: I think maybe even we had a lot of options to choose from, maybe.
1:00
SPEAKER_01: Okay, that's fair.
1:01
SPEAKER_01: It was actually not easy to pick because there's too many um geology things in the news, let's say.
1:06
SPEAKER_01: Uh, and we decided we're gonna talk about Venezuela, the geology of Venezuela, and actually focus in maybe part one of two, we don't really know yet, but we're gonna focus in on the oil in Venezuela.
1:19
SPEAKER_01: Why is it there?
1:20
SPEAKER_01: What's going on with it?
1:21
SPEAKER_01: What's kind of the geological background?
1:24
SPEAKER_01: And we are staying away from politics, we are not getting into that aspect, but it is something in the news.
1:30
SPEAKER_01: You're hearing about it frequently, it's a really important topic, and it's kind of an interesting one.
1:33
SPEAKER_01: I don't know, Josh.
1:34
SPEAKER_01: How do you feel about this?
1:36
SPEAKER_01: I mean, we floated this idea to each other, you know.
1:39
SPEAKER_01: You you floated it to me, and I was like, oh yeah, obviously, we got to do that.
1:43
SPEAKER_01: That makes a ton of sense.
1:45
SPEAKER_01: But it's really interesting.
1:47
SPEAKER_01: I mean, the science of this is really interesting, the geology of it's super interesting.
1:50
SPEAKER_01: Do you feel the same way?
1:53
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, actually, to be honest, I mean we were speaking about this a few seconds ago.
1:58
SPEAKER_00: Both me and you are both what you would call kind of hard rock geologists.
2:03
SPEAKER_00: You know, we're we're kind of more trained in igneous rocks.
2:06
SPEAKER_00: We're harder, I say, and harder metamorphic.
2:08
SPEAKER_00: We're we're yeah, we're harder, better, harder core.
2:11
SPEAKER_00: I mean harder core.
2:13
SPEAKER_00: Just generally better.
2:15
SPEAKER_00: We would also both me and you trained uh in our PhDs at a university where they do a lot of oil type geology, and there's this kind of somehow a rivalry between the kind of hard rock igneous metamorphic style um petrology and stuff uh and and the and the sedimentologists.
2:35
SPEAKER_00: And we were clearly in the hard rock side, and you get this idea that it's not that interesting somehow.
2:41
SPEAKER_00: Right.
2:42
SPEAKER_00: But actually, yeah, actually, there's a I mean it's it's really cool.
2:47
SPEAKER_00: I mean, just learning a little bit myself.
2:49
SPEAKER_01: I I think uh sorry, uh to just to interject real quick on that, because I feel the exact same way.
2:54
SPEAKER_01: There's the definitely this hard rock, soft rock um rivalry, that's a good way to describe it.
2:59
SPEAKER_01: Soft rock being sediments, and and that's often pretty applied applied to oil and gas historically, um, industry.
3:06
SPEAKER_01: How has that changed for you in your career now being a professor at Montreal?
3:10
SPEAKER_01: Which I would imagine there's not a ton of oil and gas presence in Quebec, or is there?
3:16
SPEAKER_01: I I would imagine the hard rock side is more dominant in your department, your the industry that is around geology in your world.
3:23
SPEAKER_01: Is that true or not?
3:25
SPEAKER_00: This distinction is for sure true.
3:28
SPEAKER_00: Um that Quebec has banned exploration and extraction of any oil or gas from the province.
3:39
SPEAKER_00: They've actually got um quite a lot of oil and gas in because they've got some big sedimentary basins here, and they've done a lot of previous oil and gas exploration, but it's all stock.
3:50
SPEAKER_00: I guess it's political.
3:51
SPEAKER_00: But um, yeah, so we're not we nobody studies it.
3:54
SPEAKER_00: You can't get funding for it in Quebec at all for oil and gas exploration.
3:58
SPEAKER_00: Or oil and gas kind of science style studies.
4:01
SPEAKER_00: So nobody's speaking about it.
4:03
SPEAKER_00: I I think we speak we we have courses that cover a little bit of that aspect in our undergrad, but uh almost nothing after that.
4:13
SPEAKER_00: But now, uh as you know, I'm uh personally I work a lot more with sediments, unfortunately.
4:19
SPEAKER_00: Comp I mean my PhD self would be a bit embarrassed, I have to say.
4:26
SPEAKER_01: Um is just frowning at your evolution here.
4:32
SPEAKER_01: That's not good.
4:33
SPEAKER_01: That's not good.
4:35
SPEAKER_00: What about you, Jesse?
4:36
SPEAKER_00: You're in a kind of um Pennsylvania is quite well known as uh oil and coal and things like that.
4:44
SPEAKER_00: Oh yeah, yeah.
4:44
SPEAKER_01: I I I think Diddy know that the department that we're in is is certainly much more like the University of Alberta.
4:50
SPEAKER_01: Um at Penn State, we are uh historically at least uh maybe maybe not the modern incarnation, but historically, yes, we have you know supplied uh uh a lot of geologists to the oil patch um and you know go and have have really vibrant careers in oil and gas.
5:04
SPEAKER_01: I think that's shifted a little bit in the recent past, but uh uh uh it's kind of coming back around, maybe, maybe not oil and gas, but but sort of industry relevant science a little bit is coming back around.
5:14
SPEAKER_01: So yeah, we're much more comparable to the University of Alberta.
5:16
SPEAKER_01: But to talk about Venezuela here, like we're gonna cover really the basics of why is there oil in Venezuela, what's the story behind it?
5:25
SPEAKER_01: Because we've heard a lot about it in the news and we've heard a lot about kind of what kind it is.
5:28
SPEAKER_01: At least I have.
5:29
SPEAKER_01: I've seen a lot of the articles that are talking about oh, it's this extra heavy crude, it's very it's you know, it's sour.
5:35
SPEAKER_01: Uh, what does that mean?
5:36
SPEAKER_01: We're gonna talk about those basics and also tell kind of the little bit of the the intro level, um a little bit deeper level than that actually, but the intro level to to sort of why it's there, the story of the oil.
5:47
SPEAKER_01: And it's a really interesting one.
5:48
SPEAKER_01: Uh, and it has some uh analogies to both University of Alberta, the oil patch, the oil sands, and then also the Appalachian Basin uh tells stories about sort of fluid flow and basins.
5:58
SPEAKER_01: So where's a good place to start with this, Josh?
6:02
SPEAKER_00: I I because uh to me Well, for me, yeah, go ahead.
6:05
SPEAKER_00: To be honest, um, as somebody who doesn't know that much about oil and gas, when I started reading articles, even news articles, and they they were just mentioning things like heavy oil and sour.
6:20
SPEAKER_00: Those are words I didn't re I mean, I know what heavy means and I know what sour means.
6:25
SPEAKER_00: But I wasn't quite sure how they really applied, you know?
6:29
SPEAKER_00: So maybe for me it would just be nice to get this little bit of nomenclature out of the way.
6:35
SPEAKER_00: That's what so uh what does actually sour what is sour oil?
6:40
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so I this is something we've heard kind of a bit about, and and I think well let's just say quickly that there's a there's a a ton of oil in Venezuela, and this is the the why the in some part of the focus on Venezuela, it's a resource-rich country.
6:55
SPEAKER_01: There's uh an estimated 303 plus or minus a bunch, billion barrels of oil in reserve.
7:01
SPEAKER_01: And surprisingly to me, like you, I started reading about this, is like, wait, this is actually really interesting.
7:06
SPEAKER_01: There's more oil reserve in Venezuela than there is Saudi Arabia, which has 267 billion.
7:12
SPEAKER_01: So this is in of the oil reserves in the in the world that we know about, it's 17% of the global total, but it the production is really low.
7:21
SPEAKER_01: It used to be higher, but now they're only producing like 800,000 barrels a day or something like that.
7:25
SPEAKER_01: So not a huge amount of output.
7:28
SPEAKER_01: It is a different type of oil on average when you said sour and heavy crude.
7:33
SPEAKER_01: So uh yeah, let's let's talk about that.
7:35
SPEAKER_01: It's a funny word.
7:36
SPEAKER_01: I didn't I didn't stumble across the uh the origins of the heavy makes sense, but the origins of the sour sweet um dichotomy here.
7:44
SPEAKER_01: But did you do you know the origins of these words of or the applications of them?
7:47
SPEAKER_01: I I don't actually know this.
7:49
SPEAKER_00: No, I don't.
7:50
SPEAKER_00: I mean uh learning about I so I now understand what sour means.
7:54
SPEAKER_00: And it just means sulfur rich, effectively.
7:57
SPEAKER_00: I mean it right it's it essentially means that.
8:00
SPEAKER_00: It means that it's sulfur rich, and that sulfur is most likely coming from the source.
8:07
SPEAKER_00: So it's a source effect.
8:09
SPEAKER_00: The place that oil is coming from allows this liquid to have a lot of sulfur in it.
8:14
SPEAKER_00: And so I I guess sweet means less sulfur.
8:17
SPEAKER_00: I'm not really sure.
8:18
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I think that's right.
8:20
SPEAKER_01: It means less sulfur, and usually these go to uh a bit together that sulfur makes it more complicated to extract or to to process, basically, in the in the plants.
8:30
SPEAKER_01: So sour is uh not something you necessarily want in your oil.
8:34
SPEAKER_01: It makes it harder to process and it makes it more expensive, therefore, to process, and you can get less devato.
8:43
SPEAKER_01: Although I didn't know that there's a lot, most of the like sulfur that we use in society actually comes from oil and gas production.
8:50
SPEAKER_01: So it's kind of in some ways a byproduct, a valuable byproduct of oil and gas production, especially of sour oil.
8:56
SPEAKER_01: Um the heavy part is interesting too.
8:59
SPEAKER_01: So this is heavy crude, actually, extra heavy crude.
9:02
SPEAKER_01: And this brings me back to the oil and gas days that you're referring to, Josh, in University of Alberta.
9:08
SPEAKER_01: Like we were well, okay, question for you.
9:12
SPEAKER_01: When I was in a geologist coming vage in America, we always referred to the Fort McMurray oil patch as the tar sands.
9:20
SPEAKER_01: When you were in the UK, were they tar sands to you or were they oil sands?
9:25
SPEAKER_01: Or did you not refer to them really as such?
9:28
SPEAKER_00: I mean, as Europeans, we're a bit you know, we're a bit aloof.
9:32
SPEAKER_00: Uh I didn't I did I didn't know.
9:35
SPEAKER_00: We don't refer to we don't refer to things uh you know over this side of the Atlantic.
9:40
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
9:41
SPEAKER_01: It's just colonies.
9:43
SPEAKER_01: You don't care what the colonies actually do.
9:46
SPEAKER_00: Sometimes you get some news, maybe we have some bananas.
9:50
SPEAKER_00: Um I assumed that kind of thing was going on.
9:53
SPEAKER_00: Um no, uh I I when I started the PhD or masters, I I had no uh I didn't know anything about the oil sands or tar sands until I got the nomenclature from Canada, but they call them the oil sands.
10:09
SPEAKER_00: I think the tar sands more for me would have meant more stuff going on in California.
10:14
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I think that that might be the origin.
10:16
SPEAKER_01: I also think there's a bit of like an environmentalist movement origin as well.
10:19
SPEAKER_01: The tar sands, they they they sound worse tar sands than oil sands.
10:23
SPEAKER_01: And so I think I think you're right, it the origins are probably from California and tar sands, but then also these.
10:28
SPEAKER_01: But these things are not uncommon, and that's extra heavy crude oil, really, really heavy oil.
10:34
SPEAKER_01: It's more like asphalt than than actual oil that you think of than than gasoline.
10:38
SPEAKER_01: You know, it's not gasoline, it's more like asphalt, really thick, sticky stuff.
10:43
SPEAKER_00: And this stuff is not actually what you'd want, right?
10:45
SPEAKER_00: I mean, it's not it's not this is nowhere near fuel that you put into your cars or anything that you would actually burn.
10:53
SPEAKER_01: That's exactly right.
10:54
SPEAKER_01: That's exactly right.
10:54
SPEAKER_01: And so there's there's several different um like classes of oil, oil grades that are like tradable commodities, basically.
11:02
SPEAKER_01: And we can they map these out in different well, basically, you know, how heavy they are, which is basically a gravity thing.
11:07
SPEAKER_01: It it's how dense this stuff is.
11:09
SPEAKER_01: The sulfur content, so sour or sweet, and they can you know map these out.
11:13
SPEAKER_01: And four of the grades are grades where Venezuela is the top producer for categories of oil, where Venezuela is the top producer, are Mesa 30, which is a medium sour, the hamaca, I might not be pronouncing these perfectly, but hamaca, which is a heavy sour, the Mary 16, which is also a heavy sour, and then Boscan, which is extra heavy sour.
11:37
SPEAKER_01: And so those are medium sour, heavy sour, heavy sour, extra heavy sour.
11:42
SPEAKER_01: And those are the four where Venezuela is the top producing, the top producer of this category or this grade of oil.
11:48
SPEAKER_01: The only grade that's heavier is the Athabasca bitumen, which is tar sands or oil sands, which we are familiar with.
11:55
SPEAKER_01: Because like, how many undergrads did we teach, Josh, that that went up in the summer and worked at Fort McMurray in the oil patch and like you know, made a bunch of money driving a truck around or something like that up in the oil patch?
12:05
SPEAKER_01: And I was I never really paid attention to it and never really thought why is the oil super heavy up there?
12:11
SPEAKER_01: Why is it tar sands or oil sands?
12:13
SPEAKER_01: Like, what's going on here?
12:14
SPEAKER_01: But I think the story of Venezuelan oil helps explain that type of oil process as well.
12:20
SPEAKER_01: And I think the way to visualize this for for people is that this stuff is much more like cold molasses.
12:25
SPEAKER_01: So when it's cold, when it's near the surface, it's kind of sticky stuff.
12:30
SPEAKER_01: It's not flowing like you would think oil flowing out of an oil well in the movies is.
12:36
SPEAKER_01: It's really sticky stuff.
12:38
SPEAKER_00: It's also an important point you made just then, Jesse, about uh it being near the surface.
12:44
SPEAKER_00: I think that's really the crucial uh I guess there are two parts to that.
12:48
SPEAKER_00: Uh one of the aspects of it being near the surface actually is the way it becomes this heavy oil.
12:54
SPEAKER_00: That actually happens close to the surface.
12:56
SPEAKER_00: The other part is a is an economic part.
12:59
SPEAKER_00: I mean, uh most uh people looking for uh petroleum products don't look for that.
13:06
SPEAKER_00: Because it's like a tar.
13:07
SPEAKER_00: It needs so much more refining.
13:09
SPEAKER_00: But uh because it's at the surface, it's extremely easy to get.
13:13
SPEAKER_00: Uh the Athabasca oil sands, they they kind of go with a bulldozer.
13:17
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, they're actually mining it, right?
13:18
SPEAKER_01: It's not it's not drilling and bumping out, it's it's mining.
13:21
SPEAKER_01: You're scooping up sand, it's extracting it.
13:23
SPEAKER_00: You're scooping it.
13:24
SPEAKER_00: Yep, yeah, exactly.
13:25
SPEAKER_00: I mean Venezuela is it's not exactly like that, but it's right, it's very close to the surface.
13:31
SPEAKER_00: And otherwise you wouldn't necessarily want this extremely heavy, I guess, also sour product.
13:39
SPEAKER_00: That's right.
13:40
SPEAKER_00: And it's just so much easier to get.
13:42
SPEAKER_01: That's exactly right.
13:43
SPEAKER_01: And and so this stuff, in order to get this stuff out, it it requires specialized drilling equipment.
13:47
SPEAKER_01: Basically, you know, in a lot of cases, you're you're pumping extra fluids down there, you sometimes hot fluids to kind of make this stuff more viscous so that you can actually extract it from the sand in this case, um, or the sandstone layers.
13:59
SPEAKER_01: You need to use upgraders to turn this thick crude into exportable oil.
14:04
SPEAKER_01: And um often the refineries, you need to have specialized refineries to do this.
14:08
SPEAKER_01: And I think I I I'm not sure exactly on this if this is a modern statistic, but there's only like one or two refineries that can take this Venezuelan oil, even in the Gulf region.
14:19
SPEAKER_01: So the Gulf Coast of the U.S.
14:20
SPEAKER_01: has a ton of refineries, and there's sort of a few that are specialized in this type of extra heavy sour crude oil.
14:27
SPEAKER_01: And relevant to Venezuela, which made a lot of sense to me to kind of help explain why there's not as much production in Venezuela currently, is that when you have this extra heavy crude, you need to kind of downgrade it or upgrade it.
14:41
SPEAKER_01: You need to add distillates into it to kind of uh blend it into one of these grades that then you can sell to the refinery.
14:49
SPEAKER_01: And that's actually an import process.
14:50
SPEAKER_01: So I think of Venezuela imports historically a lot from Russian um oil and gas production of these distillates that then thin out the oil, mix it with your heavy oil, and then you can sell it off to the refineries.
15:02
SPEAKER_01: So it's a this is actually a really complicated like economic problem here that I had not appreciated how many grades of oil there were.
15:10
SPEAKER_01: I'd heard of like Brent crude, you know, but I'd never understood that Mesa 30 and you know, Marin 16 were were also types of uh grades of oil that were, you know, sort of on the market.
15:21
SPEAKER_01: And so it's a really complicated, uh complicated process.
15:25
SPEAKER_01: But Josh, you brought in, I think, the the shallowness and sort of how that gets there.
15:30
SPEAKER_01: So um maybe we can move into the the sort of story of the oil and tell the geological story.
15:36
SPEAKER_01: And you spent a lot of time thinking about the source, which I'm really curious because you you you put some really interesting points in here.
15:41
SPEAKER_01: Um, do you want to touch on that or just talk about the kind of special tectonics of Venezuela?
15:47
SPEAKER_01: What where's the best way to go here for explaining this story?
15:51
SPEAKER_00: We can start the story from the I guess the beginning of it.
15:54
SPEAKER_00: I mean, uh yeah, I I find it super interesting, the origin and what's going on with the shale.
15:59
SPEAKER_00: Basically, where does the shale come from?
16:01
SPEAKER_00: Oil is mostly it it is usually coming from um shale, which is uh organic rich sedimentary rock, essentially, and then you bury that in the sedimentary sequence often, or maybe with some um type of mountain building event uh which can kind of thicken sedimentary basins, and that puts the shale at lower levels in the crust where it's hotter and under a whole more pressure, and then you heat it up and you and you can kind of extract uh carogen or or uh these kind of things from this organic rich shale.
16:36
SPEAKER_00: So I mean I was interested in where the shale comes from.
16:39
SPEAKER_00: And actually the the shale that's producing the oil uh in Venezuela is uh we're at Cretaceous time period.
16:49
SPEAKER_00: Okay, and you've corrected me on my time scale before.
16:51
SPEAKER_01: So what are the what's the Cretaceous in numbers, Josh?
16:54
SPEAKER_01: Quiz time.
16:56
SPEAKER_00: Uh well this this is kind of upper Cretaceous.
16:59
SPEAKER_00: Um Upper Cretaceous, which was uh do you want to get more specific with about Cinnamonian in between the Cinnamonian and the Campanian?
17:08
SPEAKER_00: Okay, all right, cool.
17:09
SPEAKER_00: Good.
17:09
SPEAKER_00: What is that in numbers, man?
17:11
SPEAKER_01: I think in numbers.
17:12
SPEAKER_00: So well, we're speaking somewhere, I mean, uh to a hundred hundred to around seventy million years, something around that.
17:18
SPEAKER_01: And that's the depositional age of this organic rich.
17:20
SPEAKER_01: Uh did you say La Luna Formation?
17:22
SPEAKER_01: Is that what you said?
17:22
SPEAKER_01: The the the formation of the colour.
17:23
SPEAKER_01: La Luna formation, yeah.
17:25
SPEAKER_00: I don't think I said the name, but that's the that's the depositional age of that thing, which is the source rock of the Venezuelan oil.
17:32
SPEAKER_00: And so actually, during that this time period in the upper Cataceous, there's some there's some actually interesting stuff going on globally.
17:40
SPEAKER_00: So we've got uh a hot climate at that time.
17:45
SPEAKER_00: And that means uh well the idea is that there was no ice caps, so no ice on the North Pole or on the South Pole.
17:54
SPEAKER_00: And that creates a very different type of ocean world than what we've got right now.
18:01
SPEAKER_00: So if you don't have ice caps, you reduce the amount of ocean circulation you get.
18:07
SPEAKER_00: You also increase sea level, so that means you have quite a lot more shallow ocean basins right uh across uh next to the continents.
18:16
SPEAKER_01: So you kind of are flooding, you you're basically taking all that ice cap, all the ice tied up in the ice caps, you're putting into the oceans, which pushes ocean level up, and you're I think flooding the shallow continental interiors.
18:27
SPEAKER_01: Like, you know, maybe even where you're at in Montreal or where I'm at in Pennsylvania, these really sort of shallow lying interior continental regions that are kind of close to sea level would be flooded in this case, right?
18:40
SPEAKER_01: So a lot more shallow seas on the surface of the earth.
18:44
SPEAKER_01: Exactly right.
18:45
SPEAKER_00: A lot more shallow seas and also a lot less circulation of the water, more difficult to actually mix the ocean water between the surface water and the deep waters in the ocean.
18:57
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
18:57
SPEAKER_01: Because it creates a situation because you have these shallow seas on the continent that aren't like kind of communicating with the deep ocean, is that the the idea here?
19:05
SPEAKER_00: Well, there's that aspect, but there's also the fact that the ice caps create the thermohaline circulation on the earth.
19:13
SPEAKER_00: Oh, okay, sure.
19:14
SPEAKER_00: Because they're introducing a lot of cold water, uh sorry, a lot a lot of fresh water into the ocean basins.
19:21
SPEAKER_01: Oh, interesting.
19:22
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
19:22
SPEAKER_00: So if you don't have that, you stop a lot of deep water formation, a lot of deep water circulation.
19:30
SPEAKER_00: So then you end up with a a situation where you have what's called a stratified ocean.
19:35
SPEAKER_00: And so a stratified ocean is basically when uh the upper levels of the ocean are not really speaking to the lower levels of the ocean.
19:42
SPEAKER_00: So you might have some kind of circulation going on in the the photic zone where you've got light.
19:48
SPEAKER_00: Then as you go deep, you're actually not transporting that water deep down, and vice versa, you're not doing the same.
19:56
SPEAKER_00: And so you can kind of isolate parts of the ocean, basin, uh and they'll be chemically isolated.
20:03
SPEAKER_01: From the upper part.
20:04
SPEAKER_01: So so we've got like an uh a sort of a warm oxygenated upper part and some other composition uh in the deep deeper ocean.
20:12
SPEAKER_00: Even on the continental shelves.
20:14
SPEAKER_00: Even on the continental shelves.
20:15
SPEAKER_00: So you can also create kind of because you don't have too much circulation, if you have little basins on the continental shelf, you can create in the in the base of a like a small basin, because you've not got that much currents, uh you're not moving the water out of that little uh low.
20:33
SPEAKER_00: So you can create this stratified uh uh uh water column even in not too deep water.
20:40
SPEAKER_00: Okay, got it.
20:41
SPEAKER_00: And so in these hot situations, in these hot climates, you actually um there's often a lot of rainfall, and so you can put a lot of nutrients through river transport into the oceans actually.
20:53
SPEAKER_00: Uh there's also, which is something I'm interested in, um quite a few large igneous provinces during this time period.
21:02
SPEAKER_00: You are I mean, whenever there's whenever there's something going on in geology, there's always a large igneous province to like to cause it.
21:09
SPEAKER_00: Mr.
21:09
SPEAKER_00: Lee No matter what the problem is, you there's a lip.
21:12
SPEAKER_01: You just want a lot, you just want a lip all over the place.
21:15
SPEAKER_01: You're just one of these people who want to do it.
21:17
SPEAKER_01: But they're always there.
21:21
SPEAKER_01: Whether you're talking about, I don't know, the end permian or the uh whatever, you're there's always a lip somewhere, right?
21:27
SPEAKER_01: I mean you just love it.
21:30
SPEAKER_01: Oh gosh.
21:32
SPEAKER_01: Oh camp.
21:33
SPEAKER_01: You're you're Mr.
21:34
SPEAKER_01: Camp, Central Atlantic Magmatic Province.
21:36
SPEAKER_01: Mr.
21:36
SPEAKER_01: Mr.
21:37
SPEAKER_01: Lip himself.
21:38
SPEAKER_01: Um, if if you can't apply Bedalia uranium led geochronology to it, then you're not really out studying a lip, right?
21:45
SPEAKER_00: Well, that this is the good thing about lips, is that they just all the time you can always you can you can crowbar them in to any any geological problem.
21:54
SPEAKER_00: You can always find a lip that's gonna be sure.
21:58
SPEAKER_01: Where was I at a talk?
21:59
SPEAKER_01: I was At some I was at a very public science talk in Washington DC, and uh a guy who was in the audience came up to a bunch of us geologists afterwards and was asking about uh this this idea that a large igneous province is formed uh because you have a meteorite impact that hits the opposite side of Earth, the like antipodal model for sort of a meteorite hits one side of Earth and the the shock waves go around the planet and get compressed on the other side and create uh a decompression melting to form a lip uh on the like sort of opposite side of the planet, basically.
22:31
SPEAKER_01: Um and he wanted to explain all sorts of phenomena because of of this this model, but it it really made me think of you Josh, Josh loves studying large England's provinces, and it's he would love this idea.
22:43
SPEAKER_00: I wonder, I wonder if it's the same guy, because I I don't remember exactly when, but I traveled somewhere, uh maybe I was on a field trip or something, with a guy, and that was one of his research areas, this exact subject.
23:01
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
23:01
SPEAKER_00: And he wrote a EPS uh Earth and Planetary Science Letters paper.
23:05
SPEAKER_00: Oh, right, okay.
23:06
SPEAKER_00: And he he he told me about it and I looked it up afterwards.
23:09
SPEAKER_00: And I I wonder if it's possibly the same person.
23:13
SPEAKER_01: I don't think that's extremely well cited, his paper.
23:16
SPEAKER_01: The person I was talking to, I think, was more of a um, you know, sort of a um somebody who paid attention, who who who like was learning, was not a uh uh a practicing geologist, but was more just kind of interested in the subject and and brought so but maybe he'd uh heard about it from this uh this this individual that he talked about.
23:33
SPEAKER_01: But anyway, okay, large igneous provinces aside, um we're continental weathering.
23:38
SPEAKER_01: Uh what make the make the even if it's a very weak link, Josh, make the weak link between continental weathering and the large igneous province for us here.
23:49
SPEAKER_00: Well, I mean uh the good thing about large igneous provinces, and there are a few in the in the Cretaceous.
23:55
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, okay.
23:56
SPEAKER_00: Um, is that which ones they're at curiosity.
23:59
SPEAKER_00: Uh well, I mean, there's a Caribbean Large Igneous Province, which is about the same age, which I mean is quite proximal, quite a good location.
24:09
SPEAKER_00: And there's also another one in the High Arctic called the High Arctic Lip.
24:13
SPEAKER_01: Oh yeah, okay, right.
24:15
SPEAKER_01: This is like Ellesmere Island and the ones way, way, way, way the heck up there in the Arctic Islands.
24:20
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
24:20
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
24:21
SPEAKER_00: Um Graham Pearson had a PhD student working on it.
24:24
SPEAKER_00: Oh yeah, and Dave Dockman published a couple of papers recently.
24:26
SPEAKER_00: Dave Dockman, yeah.
24:28
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it was Dave Dockman.
24:31
SPEAKER_00: So the the good thing is these lips, uh large in this provinces, they put a lot of mafic volcanism, mafic magmas, like basalt essentially, uh onto the continents.
24:43
SPEAKER_00: And basalt is very easy to weather.
24:48
SPEAKER_00: So essentially if you add a lot of basalts, yeah, yeah.
24:51
SPEAKER_01: And they add a lot of phosphorus, right?
24:52
SPEAKER_00: You you get um a decent amount of phosphorus, um, by by weathering uh basalts, you can produce a lot of phosphorus and then you can put that into the ocean.
25:01
SPEAKER_00: And that is basically food for microbes.
25:04
SPEAKER_00: Right, okay.
25:05
SPEAKER_01: So we've got this combination of like hot stratified ocean, uh lots of continent weathering, maybe gosh, maybe some lips in there just to please the please the people who love lips.
25:16
SPEAKER_01: The lip abs once.
25:18
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, exactly.
25:20
SPEAKER_01: And so this, I'm guessing, leads to like a really high biological activity ocean uh in an ocean bottom where you get a lot of organic matter being produced and I'm guessing preserved.
25:32
SPEAKER_01: So you're you're getting a whole bunch of organic matter being produced and deposited on the seafloor eventually to produce our hydrocarbons, right?
25:40
SPEAKER_00: Yep, it's basically exactly that.
25:42
SPEAKER_00: Do you I mean you just have kind of algal blooms?
25:46
SPEAKER_00: You can think of them as that, and then you're kind of you're raining down organic matter onto the seafloor.
25:53
SPEAKER_00: Uh but the important thing is that actually um in a normal um ocean with good ocean circulation, what happens is as the organic matter is kind of falling down through the water column, it gets broken down.
26:08
SPEAKER_00: So so organic matter uh uses oxygen.
26:12
SPEAKER_00: If it it can be broken down with free oxygen to produce CO2 and water.
26:19
SPEAKER_00: So but actually this process um it uses up quite a lot of oxygen.
26:24
SPEAKER_00: And so if you have uh water that's not continually interacting, continually replenishing its oxygen reservoir, you can use up all of that oxygen quite easily.
26:36
SPEAKER_00: And then that organic matter then doesn't get broken down and gets preserved, and you've got like a section of water that is essentially anoxic.
26:44
SPEAKER_00: So that's kind of one of the main ways that you kind of fall.
26:47
SPEAKER_01: Right.
26:48
SPEAKER_01: This is why up in uh up in your country all the peat bogs are preserving all sorts of stuff, is because they're they're incredibly anoxic, got this layer of organic matter sitting over the water column.
26:57
SPEAKER_01: So this is why you have like old mastodons and King Richard or whatever is found in ball peat bogs somewhere, right?
27:04
SPEAKER_01: Because it's so anoxic that the organic matter is is kind of uh preserved.
27:08
SPEAKER_01: So similar phenomenon, except we're talking about like a huge scale on a continental shelf where you're getting this anoxic bottom water, creating this layered stuff, and I'm guessing uh you know, no life is going on.
27:19
SPEAKER_01: So in a normal ocean bottom, we're getting all sorts of organisms living within the sediment interface, even that are kind of eating stuff, and and this isn't happening in this type of setting.
27:27
SPEAKER_00: So no.
27:28
SPEAKER_00: Essentially, you don't have you don't also have yeah, bioturbation using up the uh the organic material in the sediments.
27:36
SPEAKER_00: It's you and uh apparently the La Luna formation is just a very, very tightly, finely laminated black shale with classic black shell.
27:45
SPEAKER_01: And the the the I I think it's worth pointing out black shells are like a a hydrocarbon source in in most, if not all, settings for uh hydrocarbons and oil and gas reserves.
27:55
SPEAKER_01: And you know, the big development in the 2000s, uh mid-2000s was the shale gas revolution was actually tapping the the shale reservoirs, you know, fracking the shales and stimulating them to release their gas and oil in them.
28:09
SPEAKER_01: Uh, but there always been a source rock.
28:11
SPEAKER_01: And we've always thought that that oil gets formed there and then moves somewhere else into uh a classic trap or something like that.
28:20
SPEAKER_01: And and these are often moving from the impermeable shale layers into the porous and permeable like sandstones or carbonates above them to kind of move around in the sedimentary basin.
28:30
SPEAKER_01: So um what about the sulfur?
28:32
SPEAKER_01: Is there a sulfur like what what what makes this stuff uh sour?
28:37
SPEAKER_01: Um in particular soil?
28:40
SPEAKER_00: Um so so when you get this organic material deposited in a kind of anoxic basin in the ocean, there's still microbes available that can kind of biodegrade the organic material without oxygen.
28:57
SPEAKER_00: So some of the organic material will contain some sulfate, some some basically oxidized sulfur.
29:03
SPEAKER_00: And microbes can use that to break down the organic matter, and that produces hydrogen sulfide and CO2 in the rock itself, in in the sediment itself.
29:18
SPEAKER_00: And so then the hydrogen sulfide that's produced, which is a gas, will actually then react with the organic matter that's around to produce kind of sulfur-rich organic compounds.
29:29
SPEAKER_00: That's kind of from my understanding, how you kind of get this sulfur into the source rock and then it eventually gets into the oil.
29:39
SPEAKER_01: Interesting.
29:39
SPEAKER_01: So the the the this combination of phenomena kind of makes this stuff, it preconditions the source and again, we're focusing on the source rock here, not the oil and gas reservoirs, but the source rock.
29:49
SPEAKER_01: So um this is reacting, we're producing these sulfur-rich organic compounds.
29:54
SPEAKER_01: They also, these compounds, there's a lot of relatively heavy metals in the relatively high concentrations of heavy metals um in the oil and gas reservoirs in Venezuela, and this is in large part probably related to the same process.
30:09
SPEAKER_01: I mean, we all know, well, geologists frequently know that black shales often have kind of pyrite in them.
30:14
SPEAKER_01: They can have vanadium and tantalum and things in them as well, and a slightly higher concentration.
30:19
SPEAKER_01: And you know, this is actually a really interesting potential resource for critical metals in the in the US at least.
30:24
SPEAKER_01: People are focusing on black shales and and trying to maybe think about extracting some of these heavy metals from them as a byproduct of oil and gas extraction to to help with the whole critical minerals crunch at the moment.
30:36
SPEAKER_01: So I I I I think there's a lot of focus on these oil, the these these oil and gas source rocks for a bunch of different resources because a reducing environment with a lot of hydrocarbons around, a lot of elements with that are redox sensitive, uranium, for instance, can get trapped in these rocks as well.
30:54
SPEAKER_01: Vanadium is another one that has all these redox states and is is uh in a four-plus charge state, doesn't move around in water, whereas in a six-plus state it does.
31:02
SPEAKER_01: So they can get sequestered into these black shales at a higher concentration than the than the sandstones or the carbonates that are also in the sedimentary package.
31:12
SPEAKER_01: So sulfur can be bound in there, which makes this stuff sour.
31:16
SPEAKER_01: So Josh, uh I don't know.
31:19
SPEAKER_01: The source rock, I think is part of the story, and I think it's a really interesting one.
31:24
SPEAKER_01: I hadn't appreciated the fact that um it had to do well, a lip, of course, you can always relate it to a lip, but the the warm climate and uh you know continental shelves was is a is a new story to me.
31:35
SPEAKER_01: But uh the another aspect of this that was really interesting to me was the the migration of the oil and getting it close to closer to the surface and making it heavy.
31:44
SPEAKER_01: I had not appreciated that there's this direct link between the oil migrating and get it getting heavy, becoming heavy oil.
31:53
SPEAKER_01: Um, the tectonics of the Caribbean.
31:57
SPEAKER_01: How well do you understand the tectonics of the Caribbean?
32:00
SPEAKER_01: Because it's a complicated uh area, complicated tectonic part of the world.
32:06
SPEAKER_01: And I think we should not get into the details here, but we should kind of simplify this to uh tell the story of oil migration here after.
32:13
SPEAKER_01: So now we're buried in the source rock 100 to 70 million years ago.
32:17
SPEAKER_01: We've got these hydrocarbons buried in this shale.
32:19
SPEAKER_01: We need to move them around to get us moving forward in the story.
32:23
SPEAKER_01: And tectonics are involved, but what's your sense of how detailed we need to get in this, Josh?
32:27
SPEAKER_00: Probably we don't need to go too crazy, but there's one one question I want to ask you, Jesse, about the about specifically about the tectonics of the Caribbean.
32:36
SPEAKER_00: Well the Caribbean, however, you evernoun Okay Caribbean, Caribbean, however.
32:44
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
32:45
SPEAKER_00: Um did you ever see a paper um putting you on the spot now?
32:50
SPEAKER_00: Oh yeah, okay by um uh uh Thareus Guerrilla about uh the origin of subduction.
32:59
SPEAKER_00: Basically the origin of how subduction could start on Earth based on a kind of a model that he did using the Caribbean as an example.
33:11
SPEAKER_00: He suggested essentially there's a nature paper by him, I mean one of his many nature papers.
33:18
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah, on the origin of subduction, yeah.
33:20
SPEAKER_01: Well, I know by name.
33:21
SPEAKER_01: I I don't know Terris by uh I I know him by name and reputation and work on subduction zone modeling for sure.
33:27
SPEAKER_01: But I I can't remember the the specific one.
33:29
SPEAKER_00: What was the This is the one he suggests um that if you put a large mantle plume essentially into an area like the Caribbean uh plate, you can kind of I don't remember exactly how it works in his model, but uh the fact that you have this particular heat source above uh a plate that's surrounded by continents on many sides actually allows it to create subduction.
33:59
SPEAKER_00: The mechanism I don't remember exactly.
34:01
SPEAKER_00: And so I was hoping that you would be able to help fill it in here, but maybe you don't have to be able to do that.
34:06
SPEAKER_01: No, I'm sorry, I'm gonna I gotta leave you hanging there, Josh.
34:09
SPEAKER_01: I don't know.
34:10
SPEAKER_01: I don't know that one.
34:11
SPEAKER_01: Um, but I know that uh it I know that it's difficult to start subduction um in any geodynamical model that you create, uh, and we don't understand it very well.
34:20
SPEAKER_01: I also know that there's a lot of subduction going on all over the Caribbean, um, in the Caribbean, and uh it it it's very complicated.
34:28
SPEAKER_01: Uh both of them, in fact.
34:30
SPEAKER_01: Yes.
34:31
SPEAKER_01: Um for the sake of this story, I don't think we need to get into too much detail except to say that the Caribbean plate had uh this depositional environment was occurring, and the Caribbean plate kind of came from the northwest and kind of hit Venezuela, maybe at an angle, probably not a direct head-on collision, but we're kind of dealing with a an accretionary event coming from the northwest and kind of collapsing the basin down in on itself, and we're hitting the crystalline rocks that are the Guyana shield.
35:05
SPEAKER_01: And uh we'll we'll talk about this a little bit more probably in in a part two on critical metals and critical minerals in Venezuela.
35:11
SPEAKER_01: But so we've got this to the southeast, we've got the Guyana shield, and there's sort of a collision.
35:15
SPEAKER_01: There's a basin uh going off into the into the to the northwest, and then we have the Caribbean um plate kind of coming in and creating shortening, so squishing this thing.
35:25
SPEAKER_01: And this is where the story got, I think, kind of interesting to me, Josh, because we have a lot of like normal faulting going on, tilting and rotating these blocks, and also some thrusting and creating kind of these these big tilted anti-clonoria.
35:41
SPEAKER_01: And this uh really made me think of um these models.
35:45
SPEAKER_01: Have you heard of these the squeegee model for the Appalachian Basin or for any uh basins in fluid flow before?
35:53
SPEAKER_00: No, I don't know.
35:54
SPEAKER_00: I don't know this model.
35:55
SPEAKER_01: It's uh it's a paper um uh by Oliver from I think the 1990s, or excuse me, 1980s.
36:03
SPEAKER_01: There was maybe a summary one in in 1992, but it was basically saying that if you so if you take the Appalachian Basin as an analogy, where you you have this this thick foreland basin, you know, thick oil and gas deposits in here, and and you you create uh a bunch of thrust sheets.
36:20
SPEAKER_01: Basically, the idea is that you have a thrust sheet, kilometer scale thrust sheets stacking on top of one another, and you basically squeeze all the water and the hydrocarbons in the basinal brines from the the area near the faulting and the thrusting off into the basinal margins.
36:37
SPEAKER_01: And so basically all that all the fluid flow in the Appalachian Basin would have moved from east to west or kind of southeast to northwest, including the hydrocarbons would have moved.
36:48
SPEAKER_01: Um, and so this squeezing is because of basically thickening.
36:52
SPEAKER_01: Well, there's I I think there's a there's a couple, there's a debate about the the variety of factors, but yes, thickening is one of them.
36:58
SPEAKER_01: There's also this like originic uh hydro um oh what do they call it, uh hydrodynamic orogenic hydrodynamic forcing or something where basically you have high high elevation mountains with thrush heets that you have rainfall and that water is kind of perkling into the basin on one side and then kind of squishing it out as it gets squeezed out into these sort of shallowly dipping sediments out of the basin.
37:22
SPEAKER_01: So you kind of have this sort of hydrological forcing as well.
37:26
SPEAKER_01: But basically, the it culminated, it reminds me of this because it it the title of the paper was really good.
37:31
SPEAKER_01: It was The Spots and Stains of Plate Tectonics.
37:34
SPEAKER_01: I think it was the 1992 paper.
37:36
SPEAKER_01: It's just a great paper because it was talking about like oil and gas deposits being sort of flushed out to the margins of a basin.
37:43
SPEAKER_01: Instead of like in the center of the basin or in the deepest part of the basin, all the oil and gas reservoirs are kind of near the margins, and so the fluids were squeezed out in some way.
37:52
SPEAKER_01: And it also related it to um the Mississippi Valley style lead zinc deposits, which are often basinal brine fluid flow deposits um that were also sort of squeezed out from the deep basin interior up onto the margins and kind of up into the shallower regions.
38:08
SPEAKER_01: So to me, that's what this really nice analogy then.
38:11
SPEAKER_01: It's a it's a good one, right?
38:12
SPEAKER_01: And it relates to the Appalachian Basin where you where you and I um um live and actually relates to Athabasca as well, because that's on the on the the the sort of shallow end of the western Canadian sedimentary basin.
38:24
SPEAKER_01: You know, that's not the deepest part of the sediments, that's where stuff has been kind of squeezed up onto the edges of the basin by all the tectonics and the thrusting in the Canadian Rockies.
38:34
SPEAKER_01: So I thought that was a nice analogy to the Venezuelan system and a good kind of visual.
38:39
SPEAKER_01: If you have Venezuela there on the north part of South America, this Caribbean plate's coming in from the northwest, kind of hitting a glancing blow and squeezing all the fluids up kind of to the south-ish, north or southeast, south-ish, sort of broadly.
38:56
SPEAKER_01: So, why is that important that all the fluids from the basin, the deep stuff in the basin where it's thickest, get squeezed up shallower?
39:04
SPEAKER_01: Why does that matter and why does that create heavy oil?
39:08
SPEAKER_00: So for for it's been kind of crucial for developing the kind of the kind of oil deposits that that Venezuela's got, because this heavy oil is essentially generated by uh degradation, uh microbial degradation of oil.
39:27
SPEAKER_00: Because the oil that was extracted from this Laluna formation, uh this shale, is not heavy.
39:34
SPEAKER_00: It's actually uh sulfur rich, so it would be, I guess, classed as sour.
39:39
SPEAKER_00: But uh it it's normal oil.
39:41
SPEAKER_00: It's a very good quality, kerogen essentially.
39:45
SPEAKER_00: But this thing that it's uh it's essentially traveled to shallower levels through this potentially squeezing process, and then it's kind of interacted with the surface waters and it's sat there for millions of years.
40:00
SPEAKER_00: That's the idea.
40:01
SPEAKER_00: It's been hanging out at show at shallow levels for multiple millions of years, interacting with water and microbes.
40:12
SPEAKER_00: And so microbes slowly break down oil, essentially.
40:17
SPEAKER_00: They actually break down the shorter chained hydrocarbons much quicker than the the the longer chained hydrocarbons.
40:27
SPEAKER_00: So as the um microbial breakdown kind of continues, the oil hydrocarbons become longer, and the oil becomes essentially heavier and thicker.
40:38
SPEAKER_01: And I think that makes sense, right?
40:39
SPEAKER_01: Like the the longer chain hydrocarbons, the resins and the asphaltines and things like that, they're much akin to uh silica in granite.
40:50
SPEAKER_01: Uh uh in you know, the comparison of basaltic magma to granitic magma, that you have longer chains of silica tetrahedron, which makes it stickier, makes it more viscous, less it doesn't flow as easily, more resistant to flow.
41:04
SPEAKER_01: Same thing is with hydrocarbon chains, effectively.
41:06
SPEAKER_01: I mean, it's a simplistic way to think about it, but I think it works that you get longer chains of stuff that are kind of making it um more sticky.
41:14
SPEAKER_00: And so you can kind of yeah, you can imagine it like pouring out a jar of marbles versus pouring out a jar of kind of cooked spaghetti.
41:23
SPEAKER_01: Oh, that's oh, how about this, Josh?
41:25
SPEAKER_01: Uh uh a jar of uh you know pearl bracelets or pearl um necklaces that are marbles tied together, maybe.
41:34
SPEAKER_01: Better analogy, maybe?
41:36
SPEAKER_01: Spaghetti.
41:37
SPEAKER_01: Maybe slightly cooked spaghetti.
41:39
SPEAKER_01: Maybe slightly better.
41:40
SPEAKER_01: Oh my goodness, what a silly analogy that is.
41:42
SPEAKER_01: Uh uh, but I think this is really interesting.
41:44
SPEAKER_01: So so you're saying that the microbes consume the basic stuff, what the stuff that makes light oil first.
41:50
SPEAKER_01: And so anything sitting near the surface for any amount of time that uh has bacteria around, which most of them do, will eventually degrade or be eaten away.
41:59
SPEAKER_01: The light stuff, the the light crude will be eaten away and only the sort of heavy oils will be left behind.
42:05
SPEAKER_00: Essentially, and so this is it's it's actually a kind of a a self-regulating process that because at a certain point the microbes will stop uh eating or stop breaking down the oil because they've basically used up all of the light hydrocarbons.
42:23
SPEAKER_00: So often in these situations, I mean the oil n not necessarily sat around for very long very long time.
42:30
SPEAKER_00: There's continually new oil being put into the in into the the reservoir, so maybe your type of oil kind of stays the same for a long for uh during production.
42:42
SPEAKER_00: But it seems that for Venezuela, the oil has sat there kind of isolated from the source rock for a very long time and it's just degraded to a level where now it is almost at we could say the worst uh the the worst state for it.
42:59
SPEAKER_00: It's not quite as bad as the Athabascar oil sounds, which we would consider kind of almost maximum degradation.
43:06
SPEAKER_00: It's just the the step before that.
43:09
SPEAKER_00: Okay, interesting.
43:10
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I think this is uh I mean this explains a lot, right?
43:14
SPEAKER_01: It explains the the complicated tectonics in this region.
43:16
SPEAKER_01: First of all, the the really nice uh setting for the deposition of the La Luna Formation, the source of the oil, this oil migration pathway.
43:25
SPEAKER_01: Not all of Venezuelan oil is you know this extra heavy, sour crude.
43:31
SPEAKER_01: There's certainly light oil around.
43:33
SPEAKER_01: There's still some oil tapped from the La Luna Formation and related sandstones there, usually a bit deeper, uh uh uh right, Josh?
43:39
SPEAKER_01: They're they're deeper.
43:40
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
43:40
SPEAKER_01: Um yeah.
43:42
SPEAKER_00: So I mean this this heavy oil is actually in a particular basin.
43:46
SPEAKER_00: It's called the Orinoco Belt.
43:49
SPEAKER_00: Um, where you find all the the heavy oil.
43:52
SPEAKER_00: But there's actually other, I mean, oil basins that are a a little bit separated that are deeper.
43:59
SPEAKER_00: The Maracaipao.
44:02
SPEAKER_00: I don't know if that's at all anywhere near what it should be pronounced, how it should be pronounced.
44:07
SPEAKER_00: But this is um a basin a little bit more to the west um and it's deeper and the oil in that basin is is much less heavy.
44:16
SPEAKER_00: So it's it just hasn't been degraded as much.
44:18
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and I think this is um you know there there there's a a clear relationship here to the depth of the basin, and um you can look at this on a map.
44:28
SPEAKER_01: I mean there's a there's beautiful maps that show Venezuelan oil and gas deposits and oil and gas locations, and basically the further south you go, you get oil fields, and then you get into the the really heavy, the Orinoco heavy oil belt, and the very uh well, not the southernmost part of the country, but the southernmost part of this basin where it's the the sediments are getting shallower.
44:50
SPEAKER_01: And remember, you have to think of a sedimentary basin as each sedimentary layer can be continuous across the basin, but it's thickest in the the deepest part of the basin, and it's thinner on the margins of the basin.
45:04
SPEAKER_01: So you basically have thick sediments and thick packages of individual sediments in the middle, and then on the margins you have the same sequence of sediments, just thinner.
45:13
SPEAKER_01: And so you can kind of follow a continuous package of, let's say, sandstones or shales or uh carbonates across the basin, and that's what those fluids will follow.
45:24
SPEAKER_01: So, you know, they'll get in a sandstone layer with some shale cap, and they'll just flow up into this thinner and thinner and thinner horizon until eventually they might, you know, sort of daylight on the surface and become oil sands uh in that case.
45:38
SPEAKER_01: And as they get near the surface, more exposed to microbes, they cool down, they get degraded, they get thicker and become heavy or or super heavy crude oils.
45:48
SPEAKER_01: And you can really see this nicely uh in a map across the country from north to south.
45:53
SPEAKER_01: You can see the oil and gas, um, the southern part of the basin.
45:56
SPEAKER_01: Actually, this this heavy oil belt is south of the maximum location of the oil source, this Cretaceous oil source.
46:06
SPEAKER_01: So we know this stuff has moved because there's no source rock in the region of this Orinoco heavy oil belt.
46:12
SPEAKER_01: So that that that location, the source rocks are actually only found to the north of the basin.
46:18
SPEAKER_01: So we know that this heavy oil has migrated.
46:20
SPEAKER_01: It's migrated kind of up the basin, getting shallower, getting squished out of this basin, and getting exposed to microbes and cooler temperatures, which do this degradation and turn into really heavy crude oil.
46:32
SPEAKER_01: I I it's a fascinating story that I never really had appreciated.
46:36
SPEAKER_01: I've really enjoyed learning about this, and it pulls a lot of different threads that I think are are pretty interesting from basinal fluid flow to uh the origin of heavy oils.
46:46
SPEAKER_01: Um I I I think it's a propelling story.
46:49
SPEAKER_00: I think it's I think it's really cool.
46:51
SPEAKER_00: It's also, I mean, it's interesting economically that I I I I suppose the most easily accessible oil for Venezuela is this uh degraded uh product, this degraded heavy oil, which actually makes it uh even though they've got such a large abundance of this stuff, uh it's much, much more difficult to work with.
47:11
SPEAKER_00: Uh it's I guess uh it must be extremely annoying to have to produce I mean to to generate these massive factories and these oil refineries to actually deal with all of this uh potential economic wealth that you've got.
47:26
SPEAKER_00: So you there's all of this idea that there's uh huge amounts of oil wealth in Venezuela, but uh it's more complicated than uh you might first think.
47:36
SPEAKER_01: No, that's right.
47:36
SPEAKER_01: I think that's right.
47:37
SPEAKER_01: And the the the sort of I mean, we're not economists, um, but the economics of of this process are are difficult, and you can see why it will take some time, even in best case scenario, to spin up industries accessing these resources in producing these resources, because in part, you know, this is ultra-heavy crude requires specialized equipment, upgrading, importing all these chemicals, you know, refineries, specialized refineries.
48:03
SPEAKER_01: It's just a bit more difficult stuff to work with.
48:06
SPEAKER_01: It's also the economics of it, you don't get as much, let's say, gasoline out of this type of oil, and it's not as easy to refine.
48:13
SPEAKER_01: So it's just as not as easy of a um not as easy of a product to work with, uh, even though there is a lot of it.
48:20
SPEAKER_01: So I don't know.
48:21
SPEAKER_01: It made me think back, Josh, to uh graduate school days and uh made me frankly wish I'd paid more attention or taken one of the classes that uh was was working on this type of stuff, or I don't know, just just paid more attention to the world around me and the University of Alberta.
48:38
SPEAKER_01: Um because it's it's interesting and important.
48:42
SPEAKER_00: I definitely I feel the same.
48:44
SPEAKER_00: I'm I mean I'm I'm happy now because I I work a lot in sedimentary rocks to be honest.
48:49
SPEAKER_00: Um exclusively basically.
48:53
SPEAKER_01: Almost unfortunately.
48:54
SPEAKER_01: You probably couldn't even identify a granite anymore, can you?
48:58
SPEAKER_01: Well, you never really could.
49:00
SPEAKER_01: If it was written on there, I mean I would be okay.
49:03
SPEAKER_01: You might be able to.
49:05
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
49:05
SPEAKER_01: In the in the museums.
49:06
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, if it had been previously identified and handed to me.
49:09
SPEAKER_00: Oh, this look at this granite at that point.
49:11
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
49:13
SPEAKER_01: Pathetic excuse for a field geologist, you are.
49:16
SPEAKER_01: Oh my goodness, what's up?
49:17
SPEAKER_00: But uh I I've really liked to learn more about sediments.
49:20
SPEAKER_00: I I I we were wrong to kind of pigeonhole them as boring during our PhDs.
49:26
SPEAKER_01: I agree with that.
49:27
SPEAKER_01: And I think it's uh, you know, project you and I have been talking about for ages.
49:30
SPEAKER_01: Uh, going back to graduate school days is like dating fluid flow and sedimentary rocks using um lead loss in in zircon.
49:37
SPEAKER_01: And I actually I don't think I told you this, but I was um I was giving a talk at a university in in the US recently, and we were talking about I was talking with another faculty member, uh young faculty member about uh this discordance dating stuff we'd been talking about.
49:49
SPEAKER_01: And she was just like, Oh, this is great.
49:51
SPEAKER_01: I'm really interested.
49:52
SPEAKER_01: I've been thinking along the same lines actually in the Western Canadian uh sedimentary basin.
49:56
SPEAKER_01: And and there's actually, she pointed me to some data.
49:59
SPEAKER_01: I don't think we've talked about this, she pointed me to some work that had cited our paper from way back when in graduate school days, and used it to attempt to date fluid flow.
50:09
SPEAKER_01: Um, and in this exact type of fluid flow, uh basinal fluid and oil and gas migration from the deep part of the basin, right exposed, like right up against the Rocky Mountains, and the fluid flowing out to the northwest in that case, um, towards the kind of Fort McMurray oil sands.
50:25
SPEAKER_01: And uh I've been meaning to follow up on that.
50:27
SPEAKER_01: But I think I think there's a lot of uh there's a lot of interesting stuff to work on here with with fluid flow, trying to understand it more.
50:36
SPEAKER_01: I mean, I've heard oil and gas geologists, like alumni from our department, refer to the Appalachian Basin as one of the most complicated oil and gas basins you can work in because it's so heavily faulted, so heavily deformed, and the fluid flow history is so complicated.
50:50
SPEAKER_01: It's a difficult one to explore for oil and gas in.
50:53
SPEAKER_01: Um, and that's why people are really interested in tapping the shale gas, because you can just find the shale and you found the the reservoir, you've found the stuff.
51:01
SPEAKER_01: Uh, you don't need to actually worry about where it's migrated to.
51:06
SPEAKER_01: Um, and so but it presents a really interesting I think it's a really interesting problem that is newly relevant to you know the the critical mineral space when we think about oil fields brines and extracting lithium from brines and things like that.
51:19
SPEAKER_01: So um it's a rich it's a rich space.
51:23
SPEAKER_01: Very interesting.
51:24
SPEAKER_00: Maybe there's a uh future field trip that we need to make to Venezuela to go and sample and understand the uh the fluid flow.
51:32
SPEAKER_01: Well, let's give it a minute.
51:34
SPEAKER_01: Uh it but let's give it a minute and then we could go.
51:37
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that sounds good.
51:38
SPEAKER_01: But you well well uh before we hit record, you're bringing up uh was it what were you bringing up?
51:42
SPEAKER_01: The British uh uh no, not the Trinidad and Trinidad and Tobago.
51:46
SPEAKER_00: Trinidad and Tobago.
51:47
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
51:47
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
51:48
SPEAKER_00: Which is nearby.
51:50
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it's it's right off the coast of Venezuela.
51:52
SPEAKER_00: That might be a place we could go.
51:54
SPEAKER_00: Um, but it's um I in the UK you often hear about the Trinidad and Tobago as uh a big oil producing nation in the Caribbean.
52:03
SPEAKER_00: Oh, gotcha, gotcha.
52:04
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, uh I mean they have their own political problems, I believe.
52:08
SPEAKER_00: When I was kind of learning about uh what was going on in Venezuela, I was kind of assuming that the oil and gas in Venezuela, sorry, in Trinidad and Tobago would be just a kind of a more east or or northeastward extension of the Venezuelan the the Venezuelan tectonics.
52:26
SPEAKER_00: And it it is a little bit it's the the the source is the same, it's the the Laloon formation, so the the shale is actually the same.
52:36
SPEAKER_00: But uh um during the Caribbean collision the uh shale was actually uh forced to deeper depths in Trinidad and Tobago.
52:47
SPEAKER_00: So at higher temperatures it actually produced gas rather than oil.
52:53
SPEAKER_00: So Trinidad and Tobago is a a gas and a a gas condensate producer.
53:00
SPEAKER_00: To me, gas condensate sounds like oil, but I don't I I don't really know what that is.
53:07
SPEAKER_01: Uh yeah, gas condensate sounds like oil.
53:10
SPEAKER_01: I could see that.
53:11
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, alright, alright.
53:14
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
53:15
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I it that's but I mean it's it's slightly slightly different um tectonic setting, uh, but the same source rock and basically a deeper reservoir.
53:24
SPEAKER_00: So they've got they've got basically gas, and it's not been degraded because it's all stored at depth.
53:30
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, okay, gotcha.
53:31
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that makes sense.
53:32
SPEAKER_01: I I think uh that's interesting, yeah.
53:34
SPEAKER_01: To to get to this the sort of higher maturity temperatures, you know, there's these like windows, the the gas window or the oil window, as far as the the thermal history of the basin.
53:44
SPEAKER_01: Um, and that's probably a topic for another time.
53:47
SPEAKER_01: But and somebody who's studied this more than you and I have.
53:51
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, but a deep dive on that, because I have thought about this as it relates to you know, lithium brine movements and and Mississippi Valley uh type deposits and and uh lead zinc deposits in the Appalachian Basin surrounding the Appalachian Basin, surrounding the Illinois basin, um, these places, sort of famous type localities in the the middle part of the United States, which are related to basinal fluids being um uh expunged out from the interior of the basin out to the margins, and then you know getting cooler, cooling down, dumping all of the metals out in a certain area.
54:22
SPEAKER_01: So it kind of it's it's a really um I I've really liked learning about this because it brings me back, it it showcases I find myself reading a lot of like 1980s literature uh because you go back to these really basic fundamental papers on uh fluid flow and basins and and that people haven't thought about for a long time.
54:42
SPEAKER_01: And it I don't know, it makes me feel good when I go back and read a 1980s paper, and it's like, oh wait, okay, this is really interesting, this is useful and relevant today.
54:50
SPEAKER_01: Uh, and maybe people haven't thought as much as we we should have as a field about these types of problems.
54:55
SPEAKER_01: So it makes me think there's a a big future to to some of these things, right?
55:01
SPEAKER_00: Potential.
55:02
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, well, I mean, that's maybe a bit up maybe it's your optimistic side coming out, Jesse, but uh hopefully you're right.
55:08
SPEAKER_00: Well, you've got to be.
55:08
SPEAKER_00: I mean, what's the point if you're not optimistic?
55:10
SPEAKER_01: I'd rather be a little more optimistic.
55:12
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that's probably uh but you're British, so you must be more pessimistic.
55:15
SPEAKER_01: It's in the genetics.
55:17
SPEAKER_01: I think we're outwardly pessimistic, but inwardly maybe more optimistic.
55:21
SPEAKER_01: Oh, oh, that's good to know.
55:22
SPEAKER_01: Okay, good.
55:22
SPEAKER_01: That's it.
55:23
SPEAKER_01: That's nice.
55:23
SPEAKER_01: That's nice way to phrase it.
55:25
SPEAKER_01: Cool.
55:26
SPEAKER_01: Uh well, all right.
55:27
SPEAKER_01: I think uh that's time to wrap it up here, Josh.
55:29
SPEAKER_01: Uh any last words on uh Venezuelan oil?
55:32
SPEAKER_00: Well, um I guess maybe my next my last words will be I'm I'm excited to learn more about the critical minerals coming from the the guy on a shield in Venezuela, actually.
55:43
SPEAKER_00: Maybe that's not necessarily really about uh Venezuelan oil, but I mean to continue learning about it.
55:49
SPEAKER_00: Let's continue learning about it.
55:50
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah, that's right, because there are critical metals there.
55:52
SPEAKER_01: Um, and we've heard uh let's say we've heard word about those in the news recently as well.
55:56
SPEAKER_01: So let's uh let's tackle that next in in maybe unless something else comes up in the next month, which uh uh based on the news, there might be there might be another location we need to look into.
56:08
SPEAKER_01: We should cover.
56:09
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, exactly, cover some basics.
56:11
SPEAKER_01: So uh yeah, let's leave it there.
56:13
SPEAKER_01: You can follow us on all the social medias at Plant GeoCast.
56:16
SPEAKER_01: Uh send us an email.
56:16
SPEAKER_01: Our website has a contact us like plantgeocast.com.
56:20
SPEAKER_01: And uh head over to Camp GeoMobile at first link in your show notes.
56:23
SPEAKER_01: We're got a bunch of uh I would say cool stuff coming there this year.
56:27
SPEAKER_01: So go to that.
56:28
SPEAKER_01: You can learn all the basics, intro level geology content.
56:32
SPEAKER_01: Chris and I have uh over the years made a bunch of uh some travel geology guides as well as you're getting ready for the summer.
56:38
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56:41
SPEAKER_01: Um excited to uh