Basins, the Dummy Version (Geology Week 6)

What would be worse: someone who doesn't know jack misinforming the public, or someone who should know the topic screwing up royally? Admittedly, we don't see the second very often (except perhaps coming from the mouths of presidential candidates), but we were astounded to come across a classic example in some recent research for Geology Week. You'd think that a writer who claims a PhD in geology would know simple stuff about the science, but apparently Alexandra Matiella Novak was playing hooky the day they discussed hydrocarbons in Geology 101. How else could she have written something as dumbass as her contribution to suite.io, "Major Oil and Gas Reserves in the United States"?¹ Novak's executive summary of her post says,

"The Unites [sic] States contains vast hydrocarbon reserves of oil, coal and natural gas. The Strategic Petroleum Reserve also maintains over 700 million barrels."

We're not really sure what the heck the Strategic Petroleum Reserve has to do with this, since it's just a group of oil fields that are used to store hydrocarbons that have already been produced. Apparently Alexandra didn't know that. She also didn't know a lot of other facts about hydrocarbon reserves, citing a decades-old (1995) U. S. Geological Survey report that she thought

"...discovered an additional 29 basins which contain large amounts of hydrocarbon deposits."

Matiella Novak goes on to list the 29, which include the following basins to which we've appended some facts about these "new" locations:

1. Sacramento Basin, California - more than 100 fields had already been discovered by the early 1970s
2. North/Central Montana - the Williston Basin has been producing hydrocarbons since the 1920s
3. Wyoming Thrust Belt - Contains Pineview and Anschutz Ranch fields, both of which were discovered in the 1970s.
4. Big Horn Basin, Wyoming - Contains a couple of giant oil fields that have been producing since the 1920s; it's also the site of Sheep Mountain, one of the best-known "sheepherder anticlines" in the world.
5. Illinois Basin - Almost 200,000 wells have been drilled in this basin, the earliest of which were spudded in the nineteenth century!

Of the 29 "new" basins the good doctor Novak cites, most have been producing hydrocarbons for more than seventy years. One of those she names, the Appalachian Basin, just happens to include the spot in Pennsylvania where Edwin Drake drilled the first successful oil exploration well two years before the Civil War! She should have known that... She should also have known that her "explanation" of exploration techniques --

"...Geologists conduct above-surface field testing of these areas which rely mainly on acoustical techniques that can 'hear' into the ground. Areas where a hydrocarbon pocket exists will 'sound' differently than areas that are solid rock all the way down..." -- is utter bullshit. A "hydrocarbon pocket" "sounds" different? What an idiot! She should be ashamed of herself for this rubbish; but she isn't: and that's why Alexandra Matiella Novak may be the most deserving recipient yet of the Dumbass of the Day award.

¹ This website is now defunct, and archive.org's Wayback machine never made a copy of the post. Oh, well, no loss...

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