Topic: Debunk Lindsey Williams

[PtotheG]

I came across a video on Google I am sure is bullshit, but I do not have facts contrary to its claims. You can see the video here:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3340274697167011147

The short version:

Mr. Williams claims 200yrs worth of "sweet" (low sulfur) crude lays beneath the North Slope of Alaska. Oil Companies and politicians have known about it since Henry Kissinger was in power. According to the video, Kissinger put the oil field under wraps so "the powers that be" could blackmail oil producing states in Arabia and South America into buying up the United States national debt in exchange for their crude. Saddam Hussein and The Shaw of Iran refused to go along with the plan thus we make war in the middle east. Iran is planning on flooding the market with cheap oil and doing so will crash the U.S. economy. The reason gas prices are so high is because someone at a computer in London or New York tells the Saudi's, Iranians, Iraqi's, and everyone else in the oil producing industry how much oil will cost. Essentially, a shadow group of international power brokers controls and enslaves the world by controlling the price and production of oil. They won't open the supposed filed in the North Slope because doing so would drastically lower the price of oil, crash the U.S. Economy, and loosen their control over us.

Like I said, I know this is bullshit. His lack of credentials, the hear-say nature of his argument, the number of people who supposedly know but aren't talking due to threat of death, and the fact that he continually plugs his book throughout makes it easy to discount. Still, I am not in possession of the facts the contradict his claims. How much oil is in the North Slope of Alaska? USGS info is good, but due to the nature of the supposed conspiracy, independent measurements are better.

[CharlieG]

Either Mr. Williams is the victim of very cruel practical jokes, or he is twisting the truth to sell more books.

In this post, I will only respond to the first five minutes of the video linked in the original post.
 
Falsehood:
#1.  Mr. Williams claims: "The governor of Alaska stated on the Bill Maher TV show Real Time on March the 18th, 2005 there is potentially enough crude oil on the north slope of Alaska to supply the entire United States of America for 200 years. He is correct" 
The transcripts from the Bill Maher don't show Gov. Murkowski saying anything like that. Gov. Murkowski said: "But this is a lot of oil, potentially, up there (ANWR). Alaska has been producing about 25% of the total crude oil produced in the United States for the last almost 30 years. If there's an abundance of oil in Anwar, it could be as much as what we have import from Saudi Arabia in 25 years. So this could be a very big thing.

#2.  He then claims PEAK Oil is a misnomer and sites massive oil discoveries in super deep Russian wells called "Kola SG3".  His errors are that he mistakenly uses the word "Kola SG3" as a term referring to a group of deep hole wells. The Kola SG3 is not a group of wells. It is the number designation referring to boreholes branching from a central hole.  The Kola being the central hole and SG3 being the deepest of the branches.

#3.  He claims the "Kola" wells were "just" drilled. Since his quote from the Governor of Alaska was dated 3/18/2005, we know the video was made after that date. The Kola borehole began in 1970 and the SG3 reached its final depth in 1989. Does a time span of 9 to 30 years justify the term "just drilled".

#4.  He calls the Kola super deep boreholes, "wells."  They are not wells as they were not meant to, nor have they ever, produced anything.  They were drilled strictly for scientific research. The most unusual thing from the project was the discover of very deep water and hydrogen gas. No oil was ever produced.  Additionally, the boreholes have been open to the scientific community for a long time and aren't a secret...the Soviets were very proud of them.  I heard about them back in '83.

#5.  He then claims there is enough natural gas on the North Slope of Alaska to supply the entire USA with natural gas for the next 200 years. He  also implies the reason we don't currently have this natural gas  is because 1 billion cubic feet of gas is pumped back into Prudue Bay Alaska every day. The reserves of natural gas in Alaska are stated as 193.831 trillion cubic feet. The USA consumes 82.626 billion cubic feet per day. So, even if we add the billion cubic feet of natural gas Mr. Williams claims is being pumped into the ground each day... Alaska still doesn't have enough natural gas to supply the entire USA for 200 years.

#6.   His implication that the 1 billion cubic feet reinjected (the correct term for "pumping it back into the ground" is "reinject") into the Prudue Bay is  a big secret and part of a conspiracy is lludicrous.  I don't know how much natural gas is reinjected, for all I know, it could be more, but it isn't part of a conspiracy. There are two possible reasons why it is reinjected.
But, first I should explain the term "Natural Gas" is generic.  While it means one thing to the consumer, in the exploration and production business it refers to a pertoleum product produced from wells. Natural gas can be "dry" meaning it is basically methane... the stuff piped into your home. Or it can be liquid natural gas (LNG). 

So, what are the possible reasons for reinjecting natrual gas in Prudue Bay?
Transportation:   LNG can be very corrosive to pipelines.  So the best way to transport it is by LNG Tankers. However, for safety reasons, LNG Tankers require water depths of at least 79 feet for loading. The coast of artic Alaska are very shallow.  Special pipelines can still transport LNG, and two pipelines have been proposed, but the cost of building the special pipelines has been uneconomical untill recently.  Natural gas mimics crude oil price, so it has risen too.

Production of Crude Oil: It is very common in the oil business to reinject natural gas to enhance the recovery of crude oil. The industry term is "gas lift".  Basically, the gas is used to "lift" the oil out of the rock.  Without "gas lift", as much as 50% of the oil might not be recoverable.
BTW= the gas that is reinjected.... it is pumped back out with the oil it lifts and is reinjected again. 



http://www.billmaher.com/?page_id=159
http://tonto.eia.doe.gov/oog/ftparea/wogirs/xls/ngm02vmall.xls#'Data 1'!A1
http://www.petroleumnews.com/pntruncate/297685428.shtml

[CharlieG]

ummm... am I only supposed to ask questions of the panel?  Sorry about posting answers. But since I already started, I may as well continue.

At about minute 15 into the video, Mr. Williams tells a story about an island 2-2.5 miles off the coast, Gull Island, and the discovery of the largest oil pool in North America.  He claims an employee of Arco asked him to come watch a well test because;"I'd like you to see what we think we have struck today."  They sit on the West Dock of Prudue Bay when suddenly there is a big plume of black smoke. According to him, back then it was still allowed to "burn it off." After the test, he and the Arco employee rushed back "to see what was coming in from out at the well site".

So, what are the falsehoods in this part of the video?

1.  You can't watch a well test from 2 miles away.  The test is basically a few men inside a trailer looking at read-outs and possibly test tubes.
2.  Oil doesn't burn easily and you don't "burn it off" when it is released because; it flows.
3.  Even in 1976 they had Blow Out Preventors (BOP).  I guarantee, unless it was some kind of practical joke, had there been a "plume of black smoke" it would have been because the BOP had failed, and they would have been rushing back to report an emergency, not to look at test results.

FWI =  When drilling a well, it is common to hit pockets of gas and for the gas to flow up the hole. Again, the BOP is designed to handle this gas and then divert it to a vent line. Basically, a vent line is a long pipe that runs away from the drilling rig where it vents any gas.  Oh, and the venting gas is ignited. i.e. the gas is "burned off."  As for his comment regarding “back then they still allowed them to "burn it off”?  They are still allow them to burn it off… after all its much safer to burn it off then let gas float around ready to ignite.


The story continues with Mr. Williams telling how he was included in a board meeting of the most powerful oil executive in the world who excitedly told him how fabulous the discovery was. The next day he was warned never to tell what he had seen.  According to him, the discovery was never to be released, but was to remain secret.  He also tells of an Arco executive (responsible for the development of the Purdue Bay oil fields & the cracking plant for all the oil up and down the line),  getting fired when Williams book came out.

1.  The  most productive oil field in the world is the Ghawar Field in Saudi Arabia. The producing structure of the Ghawar field is 150 miles long and about 25 miles wide. Therefore, if the Gull Island field is real, it would logically be approximately similar in size.
2.   Wells must be spaced apart from each other so they don't deplete the oil from other wells and not adversly affect the preasure needed to produce the oil.  Spacing requirements can be as big as 640 acres, or as small as 20 acres.  An acre is 210' x 210'. Under 20 acre spacing requirements, the next well would need to be at least 4,200 feet away. (5,280' = 1 mile) Therefore, too keep from pumping any oil from the supposed, Gull Island field, there couldn't be any wells within 4/5th of a mile.
4.  I fFound a geologist to question regarding the best placement for an exploratory well.  His short answer was "the high point in the structure of the field" ...which he then followed up with the exections to the rule.  However, the exceptions aren't reliavant to this part of my argument. Basically, the Gull Island field structure would easily continue to the shore.
5.   I also learned from the geologist that oil fields come in all shapes. So, while the Ghawar Field is long and narrow, fields can be round or even shaped like a stubby spider (legs extending from a center point)
 
So....if the Gull Island field is real, and there is a conspiracy to keep it secret; then simply by looking at a map, we should see a large gap void of wells someplace near the coast line.  Please see link below.  There isn't a large gap void of wells.   

Another strange part of Mr. Williams story is; it is very unlikely a person experienced in developing an oil field woud also be qualified in Cracking Plants.  One would require a petroleum engineer, the other a chemical engineer. (okay... I asked an engineer about this, he agreed it would be very unlikely, but it is possible.)

...and why in the world would the most powerful men in the oil industry allow a small town preacher to attend a board meeting?



http://www.d.umn.edu/~cstroupe/archive/5230/glocal/prudhoe/www.d.umn.edu/~hoef0049/prudhoe.html

[whitedevilbrewing]

 it is a 'questions for the panel' forum, but being the rather excitable skeptics we are, we seem to have elected ourselves (collectively) to 'the panel'. 

Besides, we can't expect the rogues to know everything... can we?

Soooo, keep up the good work

[pandamonium]

at the very least, it'll save steve some valuable skeptical time   and i'm sure the panel's collective heart grows three sizes each time someone on this forum takes it upon themselves to find the answers.

[SheilaC]

I am not going to get into a discussion about this other than to say that my father was involved in oil development big time in the north starting in the early 60s.

He's dead now, but my cousin sent me the clip of Lindsey Williams about eight weeks ago and I nearly fell off my chair.

I overheard oil execs discuss the Gull Island find in the fall of 1976, when my Dad was told he couldn't bid on it because it was going to be capped for military reasons. I have specific reasons for how and why I remember it. All the Bechtel, Arco, etc top execs hung out at my Dad's house on their way back to TX or San Fran.

Lindsey Williams is telling the truth about that part of it. (I dont know about the World Bank.) And it is perfectly understandable that a minister friendly to the brass would wind up at a board meeting in the frozen tundra in one of those buildings. You've never been on one of those fields, never worked on one, and have no idea what you're talking about.

The oil biz makes the Mafia look like a school for debutantes. You can cite all the URLs you want and petroleum reports and yammer about this and that and you will never know the truth. You know what they want you to know.

The intel agencies run the oil biz. They say yay or nay on the announcement of each and every US find. If you dont get their go-ahead, you dont go. Oil is not a domestic asset. It is a national security issue. The US govt only cares that they have enough oil for their materiel and forces. To hell with you and your cars and your house.

Since oil replacement energy sources will be solved within the next 100 years, it makes perfect sense to open these capped fields and use them, that's why Bush's offshore drilling deal is so effing disingenuous. The fields have already been drilled.

If Royal Dutch Shell shut down tomorrow, and never drilled another drop of oil and never refined another ounce of crude, and never distributed another barrel of oil, it would show a profit annually for the next 300 years.

You are naive if you believe otherwise. You should listen to what Mr. Williams has to say, even though the deal on this site is to prove mental chops by rebutting without the principal being present.

You ought to direct your skepticism at what the govt tells you.

And Gull Island isn't the only capped field. There's more natural gas under New Mexico than Prudhoe.

[SheilaC]

The only reason we did Prudhoe was because they'd perfected slant-drilling and the USA wanted to drain the field so the Russians wouldn't get it.

[SheilaC]

"Cracking plants" are used in the refinery process, not at the well.

It's 'fracing' not 'cracking' that is done at the well. Big diff. Google it.

[vonzippa]

"Lindsey Williams is telling the truth about that part of it. (I dont know about the World Bank.) And it is perfectly understandable that a minister friendly to the brass would wind up at a board meeting in the frozen tundra in one of those buildings. You've never been on one of those fields, never worked on one, and have no idea what you're talking about."

SheilaC, how could you possibly know if Lindsey Williams is telling the truth?  Let's just take what you heard as gospil, in less you were with Lindsey Williams then you have no idea what he heard or not.  And how do you know what fields or where someone has worked before, then posit that he doesn't know what he is talking about.  You have to admit that most of what Lindsy Williams says is misguided with unsubstantiated assertions at best.  Its kind of silly to think that what he says is the truth.

[SheilaC]

Perhaps you misunderstood what I wrote. The Gull Island field is real. It was capped. So were four others. I didn't say I heard it from Williams. I heard it from the oil execs themselves talking to my father in my father's house in 1976. They were pay-grades above a Lindsey Williams. People like George Schultz from Bechtel. Get it?

[whitedevilbrewing]

"If Royal Dutch Shell shut down tomorrow, and never drilled another drop of oil and never refined another ounce of crude, and never distributed another barrel of oil, it would show a profit annually for the next 300 years."


Could you explain how this works?

[MikeSmith]

I think the modern skeptical movement should really avoid using the word "debunk." 

It's a term that's used so dismissively by true believers to deride us as nothing more than people that want to prove other people wrong.  And really that's not what we're all about.  We just want the truth.  We look into a story, we examine the evidence, and if the end result is that we obtain proof of Bigfoot or ghosts or whatever, that's really cool. 

Those things almost certainly don't exist, so what's more likely to occur is that we end up explaining the phenomenon in a sensible, scientific way, but we don't, if we're doing things right, set out to "debunk" as a priori skeptics.

I think we have to guard ourselves against that mentality, and we need to be aware of the facets of skepticism that the opposition is waiting to latch onto.

Just look at UFO-guy Stanton Friedman's Four Major Rules of Debunkers for an idea of how that term can be used to smear our message of logic and rationality.

http://www.v-j-enterprises.com/sfchlng.html

They are things for skeptics to keep in mind--do thorough research, remain open to the evidence, avoid ad hominem attacks, and do some hands-on investigation--just so such charges can't ever be leveled at us after every time we prove Friedman and his crew to be totally wrong.

So my point was I think we should avoid the word "debunk."  That was my point.  My point was that.

[Halleyscomet/Wakefield]

I overheard oil execs discuss the Gull Island find in the fall of 1976, when my Dad was told he couldn't bid on it because it was going to be capped for military reasons. I have specific reasons for how and why I remember it. All the Bechtel, Arco, etc top execs hung out at my Dad's house on their way back to TX or San Fran.

If he's right, then kindly explain the serious problems with the video raised in earlier posts.  Provide some resources.

Given the implausibility of the claims, it stands to reason that SheilaC is just one of the wonks hired to pimp the book on blogs, or attack those who point out the claims are laughably absurd.

[jeffxandra]

At about minute 15 into the video, Mr. Williams tells a story about an island 2-2.5 miles off the coast, Gull Island, and the discovery of the largest oil pool in North America. 

I have not watched and heard the Pastor say it, but assuming the above statemet is actually in the video then..

I did a Google Maps search for Gull Island and, to be frank, it's not 2 miles off the coast of anything. It's in the middle of a river and less than a half a mile from either bank.

[SteveV]

If you put these coordinates in Google Earth, it will say Gull Island, which is near the North Slope.  There are a few Gull Islands in Alaska, apparently:

Gull island near 70 degrees, 22 minutes, 8.53 seconds North, 148 degrees, 21 minutes, 58.49 seconds West? It's located on the north slope near many facilities.

It is near Prudhoe Bay as Williams says. There is no high resolution picture of it on Google Earth.

I am also going around to see if there is any truth or not to this story.  The one thing that always strike me is that those who do challenge these situations sometimes just goes for one or two items, find that they can't prove or disprove the claims clearly after looking at a source which they do not know is credible, and then dismiss the rest of the claims automatically.  This is a general statement, and not necessarily confined to the arguments used in this post.  The point is those who claim to use the scientific method, usually fall short of actually following it to completion.

Williams did correctly predict the rise of gas to over $4 well before others.  Kissinger did create the deals with the OPEC nations to peg oil sales to the dollar, and they are buying up our national debt at record rates.  Our currency is now a fiat system not backed by gold, and the only thing holding it up is the continuance of other nations to buy bonds.  The US, according to David Walker, previous Comptroller General of the US, has a future debt of $53 trillion due to our future obligations in the entitlement programs, and there is no way we will over come it,  ($400K, per household)  even if we tax 100% of every penny from every taxpayer and corporate profits.  The US dollar has nothing to hold it up except for bad debt, the US looks like a banana republic.  It is bankrupt according to David Walker.  So why would these countries continue to buy our debt (bonds) knowing its such a bad investment. 

So one way to disprove William's claims is to know what is the actual distribution channel between oil producing countries and the oil companies.  Is the IMF and/or World Bank (or associated companies) an intermediator during the transactions?  How can we find out?  Surely this would be public information, rather than a secret as William's claims.

It is also true that Iraq stopped pegging the dollar for oil in 2000, and Iraq became "our biggest national threat" followed by Iran who is now moving towards the Euro.  We are now creating a Navy aircraft carrier task force for the first time ever for the Caribbean and South America because Venezuela and other countries are moving away from the IMF and the dollar.  There are other countries and dictators who pose a much higher threat to the US besides these tiny and weak 3rd world nations, such as North Korea and Pakistan, who have actual nuclear weapons, not the made up variety proven not to exist in Iraq or Iran. 

Here is another question, why does the United States have over 700 bases in 130 countries, costing the US $100's of billions a year?  The cold war strategy is no longer relevant, and yet we are "defending" rich countries like Germany and Japan, while our troops are spending their incomes (in dollars) in these economies rather than in ours.  If it is to protect our economic and currency strength, its having the opposite effect, because we are going bankrupt.

The point is, there is motive for a find near Gull Island to be capped, just follow the money.  But of course that proves nothing, and in these situations when its one disreputable source versus another, the only way to know for sure is to find evidence, such as actually getting a reading of the area by digging, sonar/thermal charges, etc..