[rogerhb]

Spooky time-travel answer before post!

[marko]

Texas once had lots of oil underground. It is now mostly gone. Maybe the ground surface over the oil fields is now a few inches lower, but obviously there were no terrible consequences in Texas.

My understanding is that the oil is mostly located in sandy deposits, where it oozes between the grains of sand. What happens, I think, is that oil wells suck the oil out, leaving a sticky mix of sand and tar. So pumping the oil does not leave a big empty cave underground.

The oil in circulation at any given time is a tiny, tiny, fraction of the Earth's mass. It basically moves around the Earth's surface for a short time, gets burned and emitted to the atmosphere, where it floats around for years or decades, polluting and warming the atmosphere, before eventually being absorbed by plant matter and returned to the soil (or seabed) when the plant matter decays.

So no big deal as far as the planetary mass is concerned.

[kardea]

I had a thought, long ago, and got really side tracked with peak oil when looking for an answer.
My orginal thought was....we are drilling out all of this oil from the earth....what if it was there for some reason that we do not know? If you were to suck all the water/air out of a water bottle...it would collapse...doesn't it stand to reason that taking all of this oil out of the earth might be a bad idea??
Anybody know?
This was my orginal thought years ago and I never did find an answer

[Aaron]

I remember the first time I wa shot out of a cannon.

[green_achers]

OTOH, parts of the San Joaquin Valley in California have subsided 40 feet from water extraction.