Tuesday night, at one of the occasional Magnet Mystery Hours at FSU’s National High Magnetic Field Laboratory, researcher Ryan Rodgers outlined some of the ways the Mag Lab works with oil companies and showed how making money while feeding the world’s oil habit is not that easy.</p>
<p>Rodgers’ specialty is petroleomics, the study of all the little bits that make up every drop of petroleum.</p>
<p>But before he even got into the science, Rodgers presented a grim view of our dependence on oil.</p>
<p>Looking at it as a math problem, he explained that the United States consumes 25 percent of the world’s oil production and 43 percent of all gasoline, with just 4.6 percent of the world’s population. China and India have 37 percent of the world’s population, and they want to live like we do with cheap fuel for transportation, industry and a 21st-century lifestyle. Who can blame them?</p>
<p>But I didn’t need a smart guy like Rodgers to help me calculate that there’s not enough oil for that dream. We can make believe that a 7-mile-wide strip of gulf water holds our salvation. We can drill here, there and everywhere. It’s not going to change the price of your gas.</p>
<p>Rodgers also knows that the best oil is gone and that the crude we’re dealing with grows cruder and cruder. He showed slides of oil sand mining in Canada, where mile after mile of land is stripped away to access glop you can hold in your hand, just so you can drive to work tomorrow.
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There are no old-fashioned test tubes and Bunsen burners here. Today, using monstrous magnets, scientists take a tiny vaporized sample, accelerate it in a magnetic field and then weigh the ions (I’m told by gauging the frequency at which they go round and round, but really, don’t make me even try to explain).</p>
<p>Rodgers used a NASCAR metaphor (he must have known I would be there) to show how the bigger the magnet, the better the result. Just as you can’t declare a winner after one lap, you can’t judge an ion by one spin. But at the Mag Lab, the ions can spin 250 miles in 6 seconds, and the results are incredibly precise.</p>
<p>What emerges is a graph that looks like a cross between a porcupine and a hairbrush. It’s the oil droplet’s chemical fingerprint, and the many spikes are hundreds or thousands of compounds.</p>
<p>The Holy Grail, as Rodgers put it, is: “I give you an oil sample and you tell me if I’m going to have a problem.”</p>
<p>Compounds with sulfur are bad, because they are more polluting. The testing can spot asphaltenes, compounds that will clog pipes (when you’re drilling in water miles deep, you don’t want clogged pipes). It can tell whether the crude is likely to nourish certain bacteria that feed on oil and create a slimy mess. It even cleared up the mystery of some oil that had a bluish tint.