Is there a way to "poison" oil fields permanently without releasing CO2 from them?
I have a group of ecoterrorists who want to limit the amount of CO2 the world puts out in a drastic way: by poisoning oil fields so that the oil becomes unuseable, or at least forever uneconomical to pump up.
Unfortunately I haven't yet thought of a way to do this, not even with unrealistic wealth and technical capabilities. Burning it underground or having it "eaten" by bacteria or so would just output the CO2 immediately. Injecting water into the field is actually used as a way to get more production out of it.
Injecting sulfur to make the quality of the oil really low? We get sulfur from oil in the first place, so there is apparently a way to get it out, and there will be a market for all that sulfur because there is an ecoterrorist group buying all of it...
I guess my best bet is another chemical that makes the oil too dangerous / uneconomical to use, but can't be easily extracted from the oil. That exists in sufficient quantities to poison at least a small oil field.
Another option is to make the field inaccessible somehow, make it impossible to have wells there, but I don't know how.
Any ideas?
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They could be incompetent or short sighted eco terrorists, and it doesn't matter that they use a method that would release a lot of co2.
"We destroyed the oil by pumping oil eating bacteria down! That'll stop them from pumping up the oil and producing more co2!"
"You moron, that'll just release all the co2 at once!"
There are enough idiots in the world that the idea that a small group of them working toward a cause with incomplete information is scarily believable.
Edit:
I should say that it's not about the bacteria. It could be fire, or nukes, or demonic summoning. The point is that no matter how bad a plan, or what the long term effects, some group of idiots will be dumb enough to try it if they think it's a shortcut to what they want.
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