What if anything fills in the earth, when pumping all the oil out as we do?

Question

What if anything fills in the earth, when pumping all the oil out as we do?

Answer 1

I don't think anything "fills it in" per se, but the planet will compress through heat, small earthquakes, water, etc.  Compared to the size of the Earth, the holes we take oil out of are miniscule.

-Sean

Answer 2

Water is often pumped out along with the oil and gas when the hydrocarbons flow from, or are pumped from, production  wells.  The produced water is usually pumped back into the hydrocarbon reservoir.  

Following mistakes, oil and gas is produced more carefully now than it had been in the past.  There has been a lot of surface subsidence above the Wilmington reservoir in California.  

2.4 billion barrels of oil have been produced from the Wilmington field. Each barrel has a volume of 42 gallons. In other words, over 100 billion gallons of oil have been extracted from the Wilmington reservoir around the cities of Long Beach and Torrence, California.   2.4 billion barrels is equivalent to a volume of more than 380 cubic killometers!  (references #1)

"The subsidence at Long Beach encompassed an area of 22 sq miles sinkage ranging from 2 to 30 ft. The subsidence is attributed to pressure reduction, due to oil production from the Wilmington oil field. The injection of saline water has successfully stopped the Long Beach harbor area subsidence."  (reference #2)

"An unusual set of man-made "earthquakes" was generated in the Wilmington Oil Field, California, during the exploitation of this field. The Wilmington Oil Field was the classic example of an elliptically shaped subsidence bowl produced by the extensive withdrawal of the underlying oil. This surface subsidence produced horizontal shear stresses relieved several times by damaging sudden horizontal movements on very shallow slippage planes. Damaging shocks occurred in 1947, 1949, 1951, 1954, 1955, and 1961. These shocks produced seismograms, primarily composed of surface waves."  (reference #3)

Answer 3

Actually, one of the ways we get oil out of the ground when there's no longer enough pressure in the well is by pumping water into it.  The oil floats to the top, where we can extract it.

But as the previous answerer said, the size of the cavities filled with oil are tiny compared to the size of the entire planet.

Answer 4

In most cases nothing is pumped into the ground to replace the oil or natural gas that is pumped out.

There are modern techniques where sea water is injected into the oil well to push the oil higher so it can be pumped out.

Both cases have created sinkholes and problems for surface dwellers.

In East Texas the oil was found inside of salt domes, a very stable geographical structure.  Just this month a large sink hole appeared in an East Texas town.  The old oil wells in that are went dry until new techniques were invented with pumping salt water into the hole to push out the last bit of the oil.  This worked, but water dissolves salt and when that happened then it caused collapse of the ground and the land above it creating a huge sink hole.

Water is also pumped out from underground and in many areas it has caused subsidence as the ground gradually sank to fill in the voids that were once occupied by the underground water.

This action was slow though and the people who pumped out the original material didn’t care, or think about what would happen.  Now when a new well is pumped then an environmental impact study must be made first to prove that it won’t hurt the environment.

Compared to the entire earth the cavities that oil, water and natural gas once occupied are small, but most of the earth is molten.  The crust is a very thin coating only a few miles thick and compared to THAT the impact is larger, especially if a city is built or something that increases the weight on top of that cavity is added.  When that happens then sink holes can form.

Imagine the earth is a wet basketball.  The internal empty space would be the molten core.  The basketball sphere itself is the crust and the wet film is the atmosphere and air on the surface of the planet.  We are talking about a very thin area here and pumping or mining material out of it does have an impact.  The crust is solid, but it is not that thick.