What fills the space left once oil is taken from the earth?

Question

So here we are supping oil out of a huge cavern in lower earth, but what fills the cavity?

Will top earth slowly descend into the lower earth the oil was taken from?

Answer 1

thats funny because im was just thinking about this... enless theres like a new crust growing or some liquid or something.... once the oil is gone the earth surface MIGHT start sinking in ..... and i might not be right sorry

Answer 2

In time i think it would be the same as when coal is removed ,valleys.   codger

Answer 3

well maybe it will.......if it does, that won't be good

Answer 4

The oil is not in some massive cavern, it is in oil bearing strata. When the oil is removed the strata is still there. Don`t worry we will not all sink into the abyss.

Answer 5

Oil is not in a big cavern but is in cracks and fissures in the rock, a bit like water in a sponge or wet clothing.  

As the oil is extracted, there can be a lowering of the ground. This happened in the Forties Field in then North Sea.  About 20 years ago, a new section had to be added to the production platform as high waves were endangering the facilities as the plafform had sunk about 2 m.

Answer 6

Have you ever wondered what oil fields are really like? Many people conceive of them as large underground pools of oil, something like giant sealed-off caves flooded with oil. They imagine oil wells as something like long straws running down to these subterranean lagoons to suck the oil up to the surface. This common view is not very accurate. A better image of what an oil field is really like would start with a beach bucket nearly filled with sand and then you pour water into the sand until the water level in the bucket is just below the top of the sand. You pour in as much water as you can, which turns out to be quite a bit because, even if you’ve packed the sand down as hard as you can in the bucket, there are still tiny gaps and spaces between the grains of sand that the water can fill. The same is true with oil fields — there are tiny spaces (called pores) in the reservoir rock that the oil can fill.

So, I guess those little pores fill with water, sand or gas, depending on where you are drilling.

Answer 7

it gets filled with the atomiser and sea water and at that depth it is under a great pressure which theoretically holds things up and in place

Answer 8

More and more politicians are going to h**l, and they need the room for expansion.