The effect of nuking oil fields?

[Lundgren]

As the oil fields are nuked, anyone that have a good idea what would happen? As I see it, either the wells would collapse and closing the oil in or the oil fields would burn as the Kuwait oil fields after the Iraqi withdrawal.

After all, the oil deposits are generally quite underground. So my guess is that the blast would not destroy the actual deposit.

Any thoughts?

[stormlion1]

It counts on what's happening at the time, the oil head and derricks would be wiped out, most likely blown away completely near the epicenter (see the tower that was at the epicenter of Operation: Trinity) and just blown away the further out one goes and some near the edges of the blast being left as twisted wrecks. The fields themselves would either begin to vent off throwing black clouds into the sky (see the results of the Iraqi Army falling back out of Kuwait) or be blown out by the very blast before it even starts. Its also possible that oil will leak to the surface afterword's forming lakes of oil, oil that could be ignited forming great lakes of burning fuel. Radiation would linger which would make putting out the fires an impossibility. In the end time would put out the fires as ready fuel burns out but anything downwind will be covered in layers of soot and radiation for pretty much forever.

That's my guess.

[Matt Wiser]

Why bother striking oil fields when one can hit the refining capacity instead? Oil's no good unless one can refine it.

[stormlion1]

Salting the Field essentially. That Refinery is useless without Oil and the Refinery itself could be seized at a later time for ones own use and Oil brought in from elsewhere. The Refinery itself could even be taken apart and transported elsewhere while a enemy can never recover the Oil Field.

[Askold]

I would think that the oil field is more valuable resource than the refinery.

I suppose it would make sense to destroy oil reserves if you already had enough oil in your country and wanted to artificially raise the price of oil. Though I'm not sure who would want to do business with you afterwards. (So I suppose you'd want to smuggle the bomb in and find a way to make it look like someone else did it.)

[Lundgren]

I have been looking over these pages
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effects...ear_explosions
http://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Nwfaq/Nfaq5.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_well_fire
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuwaiti_oil_fires

So I guess that an air burst would take out the field, but the chock wave would blow out any fires. Some of those might ignite later; and the leakage from a well might reach a fire. Using inexperienced personnel might actually start more fires than the nuke. Main problem would be to gather (or train) people and get the equipment needed. The less the respect of human life is, the faster the fires will be out and new pumps will be in place.

A ground burst will be more of a "salt the earth" kind of thing. A lot of radiation in the area, which would require even more protective gear or readiness to sacrifice humans; not only to get the situation under control again, but to keep any production up and running.

I imagine that a sub-terrainian burst might collapse the wells, by squeezing them shut. But as ground penetrating weapons are special purpose, I can't imagine wasting them on an oil field.

With Kuwait, it was "one location" and a planet to draw people and equipment from. It still took 9-10 month, but it did include mine sweeping which won't be a problem in the nuclear scenario. A lot of fields hit during a short time, during a SHTF situation as T2k or T2k13, I'm assuming quite a shortage of expertise and proper equipment.

So, at least for now, I agree with stormlion1 except on the impossibility ob putting out the fires (well, at least for the Soviets, considering how they handled Chernobyl ).

[Rainbow Six]

Originally Posted by Matt Wiser

Why bother striking oil fields when one can hit the refining capacity instead? Oil's no good unless one can refine it.

I seem to recall reading that if you have oil there is a process that can be carried out to convert it to fuel without a refinery (granted, probably only a very small scale, but that may still give anyone carrying out the process a significant advantage over rivals who have absolutely no access to oil). In a T2k context, I think it's mentioned in Med Cruise (and possibly also Red Star Lone Star, although am less certain about that).

[StainlessSteelCynic]

It's certainly possible to refine crude oil without a proper refinery, there's many instances of such things happening in Nigeria and it can be done on a large scale if you have no concern for the health or life of your workers or the environment.
It's also happening in Mexico and a few other places in the world but Nigeria gets the most publicity. It should be noted that with such rough methods of refining, it's possible that up to 80% of heavy crude is rendered unusable - see page 3, 2nd column, 4th paragraph of the following PDF in which Shell Sub-Saharan Africa Vice President Tony Attah, makes reference to this
http://s03.static-shell.com/content/...eft-speech.pdf

http://www.theguardian.com/global-de...ing-stolen-oil news article about stolen oil in Nigeria
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jXeTw11fVpU check the section starting at about 1:12 to see the very crude but very simple method for refining.
http://blog.modernmechanix.com/table...-home-chemist/ an article from a 1940s issue of Popular Mechanics discussing simple refining
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D4sykoUWZ8g illustrates some of the technology used in the beginnings of the oil trade in the USA (late 1800s)