With the amount of oil that we remove from the ground, how does the surface of the earth not collapse in on itself, especially when we exhaust the supply of oil?
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Oil is usually found in porous rock. When oil is extracted water usually sifts through and fills its place. That’s really the long and short of it.
There’s a lot of Earth. The crust is over seven million cubic kilometers in volume. Our proven oil reserves plus the high estimate of what we’ve already extracted are (does math) a bit over four hundred cubic kilometers spread all around that crust.
Even then, the oil is not generally in pools, but caught up in porous rock like a big sponge, so there’s still structure there when it’s removed. And even then, groundwater often forces its way in to fill the void.
Oil is usually found from a few hundred feet to a few thousand feet below the ground. The deepest wells are 20000 to 30,000 ft, although that’s uncommon. That’s about 5 miles, or 7.6km.
By contrast, the crust of the earth is about 5 to 70 km, and the mantle goes to about 2900 km. So the oil we’re drilling is very close to the surface, and very far from many structural parts of the planet.
Think cutting off the tip of your fingernail – it won’t cause your hand to fall off.
When oil is pumped out, other fluids are often pumped in. Regardless, the sheer ratio of oil to landmass means it would be like your body collapses because you sweat too much.
A bigger potential issue is land settling due to draining the water table.
Also we are highly unlikely to exhaust the supply of oil before we are already using something else….There are probably more barrels we don’t have the technology to efficiently extract then there are barrels we do.
As others said, most oil comes from porous rock, which does not collapse easily, and empty space is filled with groundwater.
In some cases, there can be a bit of ground “settling” down, but it is small, and spread over a large area, so not very noticeable.
https://www.blueridgeoutdoors.com/go-outside/does-oil-drilling-cause-sinkholes-or-earthquakes/
mining for coal and other solid minerals is known to cause some pretty intense collapses, but they now try to avoid that.
Oil extraction is not a notable problem, but water extraction definitely is. It’s not that the surface crumples up, it’s that it settles lower. Often this results in surface water invasion, i.e. flooding.
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