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| | NRG PhD student: Mark Sugden (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-07) |
 | | God's kitchens: most people would regard these as the places where churches, mosques, and synagogues prepare meals; clubbers might assume that the Birmingham night-spot was opening sister venues around the country; petroleum geologists, however, now they would probably relate this to sites in the earth's crust where oil generation occurs. |
 | | Well, over millions of years the original organic ingredients deposited within ancient sediments succ(r)umb to natural geological burial processes, until in the "source kitchen area", typically 110° C at 3-4 km depth, the thermal cooking effect of the earth's geothermal gradient yields petroleum - an organic bakery product. |
 | | This information can be of great interest to the oil industry, as geographical areas containing rocks medium to well-done (mature), as opposed to bloody rare-medium (immature), are much more likely to contain sufficient petroleum reserves to make exploration and exploitation of such sites an economically viable operation. |
| nrg.ncl.ac.uk /people/students/sugden/essay.html (555 words) |
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