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Cold War to Modern Day setting. I have a very religious nation with an oil reserve of approximately a trillion barrels. They believe that crude oil is demonic blood and therefore rarely use it. Eventually, unsettled by the vast quantity, they decide to eradicate their petroleum reserve by nuking it.

Their plan is simple:

  1. Extract as much crude oil as possible. For this, they had to request the help of the international community under the guise of "eventually selling" the oil. The oil itself is extremely easy to extract and is very high quality so the world is very enthusiastic in helping (except the despairing petrostates).
  2. Store the oil in giant barrels and tanks. Consolidate all the oil barrels at a single location: a remote island that's part of their territory.
  3. Detonate a 30-megaton nuke. Maybe two or three more if some of the demonic blood remains.

They think they can't get rid of it in any other way.

  • Dumping it somewhere would just spread the corruption everywhere (and it also extensively poisons the environment).
  • Using it would spread demonic corruption (climate change).
  • Relocating it somewhere else would just delay the problem.
  • They're short on time. Unfortunately, the world has been corrupted by the demon blood and would be fiercely opposed to the nation's true plans if discovered, so they must act swiftly when the time comes. They patiently extract the oil while leaving the world in the dark. When all the oil is extracted, the nation will then quickly erase the oil before anyone can react.

If the nation succeeds in their plan, would there be any notable environmental effects of nuking a trillion barrels of oil?

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    $\begingroup$ One million million bbl is 1.6E14 liters... For comparison, Saudi Arabia extracts about 1.2 million bbl of petroleum per day, so that it would take them about 2,200 years to extract a million million bbl. How do they plan to store a million million bbl of petroleum? In actual for real a million million metal barrels? That's a lot of barrels... Or do they plan do dig a hole in the ground 16 by 16 km (10 by 10 miles) and 600 meters (2000 ft) deep? Or 32 by 32 km, 20 by 20 miles, and 150 meters or 500 ft deep etc. The point is that storing a million million bbl of petroleum is a massive task. $\endgroup$ Commented Nov 15 at 8:50
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    $\begingroup$ It was not an idle question. How the petroleum is stored has direct bearing on the answer. If it is stored in a million million metal barrels then most of it won't be affected by the nuclear blast. If it is stored is a large deep lake, what you will get is a massive cloud of petroleum mist which will rain down all over the place. If it is stored in a gigantic but rather shallow lake you will get the mother of black tsunamis. And so on. $\endgroup$ Commented Nov 15 at 9:36
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    $\begingroup$ Surely it would be easier to nuke the oil deposit itself? Less pollution that way too. Also, I'm not certain the "extract now, sell later" plan could be played off as just an "eccentricity". At the very least they'd come under suspicion of creating artificial scarcity. And how are they paying the extraction costs if they're not selling anything? $\endgroup$ Commented Nov 15 at 18:59
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    $\begingroup$ Religion doesn’t work the way it would have to for this story to make sense. $\endgroup$ Commented Nov 17 at 2:17
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    $\begingroup$ Nuclear explosions turn fissile matter into directly into energy, but they don't "annihilate" any other matter. Using a nuke to blow up oil will either burn it, or distribute it, just like any other type of bomb would. Why is that preferable to burning the fuel in a manner that's actually useful, or just dumping it somewhere without using an explosion? Blowing it up seems like a supercharged version of "Dump It" or "Use It", neither of which are viable solutions in the first place. $\endgroup$ Commented Nov 17 at 16:53

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The plan is somewhat ill-advised

One trillion barrels is about 160 billion tons, roughly the same volume in cubic meters.

That is a whole Lake Tahoe worth of oil. Lake Tahoe is 32 km by 16 km, or 20 by 10 in old money.

Here is the thing though – blowing something up does not annihilate it. The principle of conservation of mass applies. All you are instead doing is – well – atomising the thing, and sending each little part on its merry way with an unhealthy amount of kinetic energy.

...as people have found out.

And "nuking" something only spices things up in the worst kind of way as the atomised fragments – still in existence, not magically removed from reality – also become activated, that is to say: made radioactive from neutron bombardment.

So, you take your Lake Tahoe full of crude oil, plonk a 30 MT nuclear weapon in that, and press the big red button. What happens?

Castle Bravo mushroom cloud

"Oops..." (Image source: US DOE, the Castle Bravo shot)

You have now created a huge mushroom cloud of radioactive hydrocarbons.

The image above is from the infamous Castle Bravo test shot, when the US accidentally made a fusion bomb more than twice as powerful as intended, incinerated a 2 km wide chunk of coral reef, and the resulting radioactive ash cloud led to the Godzilla franchise.

No, not kidding, the highly radioactive ash cloud fell on the...

F/V Lucky Dragon 5, a tuna fishing boat

第五福龍丸; F/V Lucky Dragon 5, a tuna fishing boat

...and the resulting illness, death of one crew member (though that was from hospital negligence) and the outrage that followed, heavily inspired producer Tomoyuki Tanaka.

"The theme of the film, from the beginning, was the terror of the bomb. Mankind had created the bomb, and now nature was going to take revenge on mankind."

How big was Castle Bravo? That was 15 MT.

So, in your scenario, you are in essence doing a Castle Bravo, with crude oil, twice over.

Also, fun bonus: whatever remains of your Lake Tahoe's worth of crude oil is now on fire.

But despair not – the resulting stratospheric soot cloud might – might – temporarily mitigate some of the climate effects that comes from incinerating equivalent of a quarter millennium of Saudi Arabia's oil production.

Summary

So, finally answering your question: "If the nation succeeds in their plan, would there be any notable environmental effects of nuking a trillion barrels of oil?"

One could say that, yes. I would just not use that adjective, as "notable" in this case becomes an understatement akin to calling WWII "a slight altercation".

Considering the stated goals of your theocracy...

  • Prevent climate change
  • Prevent spreading "corruption" (pollution)

...then expressions like "shooting yourself in the foot with a gun" become apt to describe the situation

...only your gun is the M65 "Atomic Annie"

...on steroids.

Annie in action

Annie in action, the Upshot-Knothole series of tests, shot Grable

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    $\begingroup$ Just for context, 30 MT is not all that much actually. The crude oil itself would contain 64 times – i.e. 1.8 orders of magnitude – more chemical energy. So while the 30 MT bomb is indeed magnificent in its radiant middle finger to life, the environment, and the good intentions of the theocracy, all it does is make a splash in the lake, set it alight, and then the real fun begins, making the world's meteorologists go "huh, that is fascinating" as they get to study a whole range of hitherto unobserved weather- and climate-related phenomena as they compete in f-ing us over. $\endgroup$ Commented Nov 15 at 17:10
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    $\begingroup$ Neutron activation isn't too much of an issue, actually, since both hydrogen and carbon require two captures to become unstable. $\endgroup$ Commented Nov 15 at 17:50
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    $\begingroup$ @Aetol True, but crude oil is much more than just hydrogen and carbon. When that spicy 'shroom cloud come drifting – as per the wisdom of BlendTec CEO, Tom Dickson – "don't breath that". $\endgroup$ Commented Nov 15 at 18:37
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    $\begingroup$ If they manage to fully vapourise the the oil before igniting it, then the resultant fuel-air explosion is another 1.25 gigatonnes. However, the oil itself is a cube with approx 5km a side. I wouldn't want to be within 100 km of it $\endgroup$ Commented Nov 17 at 13:13
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    $\begingroup$ My mistake, it's 1250 gigatonnes (I took too long double checking things). I wouldn't want to be within 1000 km of it $\endgroup$ Commented Nov 17 at 13:20
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A small addendum to the excellent answers already provided; this has been done, on a smaller scale and for opposite purposes, project gasbuggy detonated a 29kt device downhole to stimulate natural gas production. While some of the gas and rock was destroyed most of it remained. One of the most efficient ways of destroying hydrocarbons is to introduce bacteria that eat hydrocarbons, they are less obvious to outside observers than fires and require considerable efforts to prevent. For the purposes of story a "super-bacterium" capable of even more rapid growth and consumption of oil and gas might be invented.

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The author clarified in comments that the 160 billion cubic meters of petroleum are stored in metal tanks.

Let's say that the tanks are 100 meters (300 foots) tall; 160 billion cubic meters divided by 100 meters gives a minimum area of 1.6 billion square meters or 1,600 square kilometers. That 40 by 40 kilometers or 23 by 23 miles, all full of huge metal tanks containing petroleum. And in the middle of this area they detonate a biggg atomic bomb.

What will happen is that some of the tanks will be vaporized, producing a gigantic cloud of petroleum vapor which will then condense and rain down all over the place, liberally seasoned with whatever spicy radioactive residue the bomb produced.

But then a lot of those tanks will just be squished and the petroleum will pour out, most likely catching fire in the process. A flaming tsunami of crude petroleum. Crude petroleum does not burn all that well, and when it burns it makes a lot of smoke. Dark sooty dirty smoke. And, of course, it is now liberally seasoned with whatever spicy radioactive residue the bomb produced.

The phrase hell on earth comes to mind.

The intrepid anti-pollution warriors have created an environmental disaster of epic proportions.

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    $\begingroup$ "liberally seasoned with whatever spicy radioactive residue the bomb produced" Not only that but the detonation will also activate the surrounding oil. This is why ground explosions are much "dirtier" than aerial explosions where the neutrons do not reach the ground to activate lots of "heavy" particles that are temporarily lofted by the fireball and then fall out of the sky ("fallout", get it?) by rain. $\endgroup$ Commented Nov 15 at 11:02
  • $\begingroup$ With many thanks from whoever does radiocarbon dating $\endgroup$ Commented Nov 16 at 8:29
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    $\begingroup$ the vaporized petroleum also will burn, even as it condenses and rains down. It'll be burning rain that self fractionalizes in the updraft and even manages to ignite some of the heavier residues due to small droplets and high heat... like, heavy fuel oil might burn on its own in those conditions. $\endgroup$ Commented Nov 16 at 15:51
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    $\begingroup$ In other note: Welcome to Darvaza - took more than 50 years to smother that hellhole, ust this is more akin to the Kuwait oil fields burning in '90. $\endgroup$ Commented Nov 16 at 15:55
  • $\begingroup$ "The intrepid anti-pollution warriors have created an environmental disaster of epic proportions." - sadly, such things happen in real life, even if on much smaller magnitudes than in this scenario. Activist groups often harm the very thing they claim to fight to protect. $\endgroup$ Commented Nov 17 at 5:26
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Frame challenge: there appears to be a fundamental problem with operational security.

Substantially all of this nation believes that the oil is demon's blood, yes? But the plan to nuke all the oil has to be kept secret, or other countries will intervene to prevent this environmental catastrophe for the whole world.

Why won't the population of this nation rise up against the plan to bring all the demon's blood to the surface, making it far easier for it to hurt them?

They can't be told that the plan is to nuke it, as anything you tell a whole nation is inevitably going to become public knowledge, triggering outside intervention.

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  • $\begingroup$ The nation is very religious, not just a tyrannical government who wants to do these. They might have elected their government on this very platform, and we don't know much else about the communication systems in place for private knowledge going public. How long was the Wuhan virus kept secret? $\endgroup$ Commented Nov 18 at 11:30
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The one thing that all the existing answers to this question seem to neglect is that nuking all of this petroleum will add an ungodly amount of energy to it. Some of that energy will be kinetic, but much of it will be thermal.

What happens to petroleum when you get it hot in an atmosphere with oxygen? It burns, of course.

So, not only will you have heaps of fallout from the nuke, you'll have heaps of carbon oxides floating around in the atmosphere... what did these religious nuts call it? Demonic Corruption?

That was it! Instant climate change, coming up! There isn't even the potential for the additional atmospheric carbon to be sequestered in plants (and things that consume plants) over time. Of course, it will take time for the global temperature to increase, but increase it will due to these nuts ill-advised efforts to destroy the 'demon blood'.

Just storing so much petroleum was probably doing a great job of keeping climate change in check, but now they've gone and 'got rid of it' in the worst way imaginable. The 'Demons' would be having the last laugh!

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    $\begingroup$ We can assume this much carbon will sequester a whole freaking lot of oxygen from the atmosphere. $\endgroup$ Commented Nov 17 at 15:16
  • $\begingroup$ Just keeping this demon blood stored in the ground would have been their best course of action... find ways to hide it so it can't be found and brought to the surface. $\endgroup$ Commented Nov 17 at 20:03
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While nukes do destroy matter it is only a vanishingly small amount of the bomb itself that is converted to energy. everything outside the bomb is just made radioactive, heated up and pushed around.

It's a dumb plan, the nukes will set the oil on fire, after the initial fuel air explosion, there will be a firestorm and most of the remaining oil will also burn up, the remainder will spill and pollute the sea. if their hope it to prevent the release of carbon dioxide this would be a massive own goal.

Probably it would be more environmentally sound to leave the oil in the ground and instead send a bunch of dirty bombs down bore holes to pollute it.

As a Quasi-religious explanation making it literally radioactive will prevent the heathens from lusting after it. Thus making it also figuratively radioactive. It will stay in hell where it belongs.

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Everybody dies, asphyxiated, burned, cooked, or otherwise.

And by everybody I mean those 8 billion sapient primates on Earth.

Strap yourselves in for some math, folks.

A trillion oil barrels has 1.59×10^14 liters of volume. Times 869 grams per liter, that's 1.382×10^14 kilograms of hydrocarbons.

As an approximation, we will assume the general formula of an hydrocarbon is (CH2)n. It might be off by +2 or -2 hydrogen atoms depending on the structural formula, but it is good enough. CH2 has a molar mass of 14. It requires three O2 for every two CH2 to completely burn.

Also for the sake of brevity, we will assume all the hydrocarbons combust completely. If they don't, the amount of CO (carbon monoxide) produced will kill every creature with red blood anyway.

So, the amount of oxygen necessary to completely burn all that hydrocarbon is around 4.722×10^14 kilograms of good old O2. But there are approximately 1.1* 10^18 kilograms of oxygen in Earth's atmosphere.

We reach the conclusion that around 0.4% of all the oxygen in the planet's atmosphere would burn. We can also assume that most of the oxygen that is burned comes from the area around the blast. 0,4% of Earth's surface is approximately 1.97 million square miles (5.1 million square kilometers).

But... OSHA says that any concentration of oxygen below 19.5% is detrimental to human health. So, from the 23% (being generous) oxygen in the air, the blast can consume only 3.5% of the total air mass before people die.

That means that the area of dead air is much bigger. if we multiply the 1.97M sq.mi from before by the inverse of 3.5%, which is around 9pi. That means the dead area is 55.7 million square miles (1.410^14 square meters).

That's around 28.28% of the entire planet's surface that suddenly became unbreathable. Which is around the entire land mass of all the continents combined. Or, close to 15 times the area of the United States. Yes, the burning oil just sucked all the oxygen sitting above every piece of land on Earth.

Of course we also have oxygen in the oceans. It won't matter much. Here comes the heat wave.

But the heat liberated by burning the hydrocarbon is around 44MJ per Kg. Times 1.382×10^14 Kg, that's 6.081×10^21 J of energy. It's enough to heat the entire planet's atmosphere by 1 degree Celsius. Or the quarter hemisphere where the detonation took place by 8. It's a gradient but I won't bother with that now. Because that detonation will also cause other flammable stuff to ignite. And pretty much everything that's not mostly silica, metal, or water is flammable at unpressurized hydrocarbon burning temperatures.

The entire planet becomes a fireball, and everyone dies. If not incinerated by the initial conflagration, then asphyxiated by the lack of oxygen. If not asphyxiated, then slow cooked as the whole planet heats up from all the carbon in the atmosphere.

And even then, the complete ecological collapse will make agriculture impossible. Whoever is left starves to death. The carbon dioxide makes all water acidic. Aquatic life dies. Coral reefs dies. Plankton dies. Photosynthesis dies. Oxygen is no longer produced.

Earth is a dead rock now. It enters a massive ice age and carboniferous era. The smog clouds the Sun, casting the land in eternal night. Temperatures plummet below freezing. Some extremophile organisms might survive and eventually evolve and re-colonize the planet in a few hundred million years.

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    $\begingroup$ Screw OSHA, as "detrimental" is waaay off "people die". Compare to mountain-living folk like Nepal, who survive pretty nicely on ~14% O2 due to lower atmospheric pressure. So your calculation is off by 2 OOM - yet is still scary enough, as even if the oxygen-less area would be 10 times smaller, everything in there would still die. But, the entire ecologic collapse is waaay away as well, the Chicxulub impact hit Earth at about 100 times the energy released here, and while it was an extinction event, the planet was not wiped clean of vegetation. $\endgroup$ Commented 2 days ago
  • $\begingroup$ @Vesper the dinosaurs beg to differ. $\endgroup$ Commented 17 hours ago
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As the previous answers explain, your religious nation won't like the outcome of nuking the oil.

But let's say they're scientifically super advanced. Not very likely for religious zealots, but hear me out...

Instead of one huge nuclear bomb, they use many small neutron bombs. They can adjust the energy output of the bombs (gamma radiation, heat etc.) such that the hydrocarbons in the oil are split into hydrogen and carbon. The hydrogen simply burns in the atmosphere, producing water.

And since these people are so advanced, they can also adjust the number and energy of the neutrons produced by the bombs such that the carbon is transmuted into nitrogen and/or oxygen. Similar to what's happening in the CNO cycle.

Voila! No environmental disaster, all the carbon is gone, no evil carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and all that's produced is water and air (nitrogen and oxygen).

Of course, this is unlikely to actually work in our world, but it might be credible in your world. Good luck!

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    $\begingroup$ to get sufficient number of neutrons to trasmute it all you'd need much more mass ("weight") of radioactives uranium etc) than you have of oil. - probably you'd need more volume. $\endgroup$ Commented Nov 16 at 13:20
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    $\begingroup$ ok, there's a fusion neutron process, usinf deuterium and tritium - if stabilize that as heavy water, then the mass would be more. if you instead store it as liquid in dewars the mass would be less it takes 3 neutrons to make Carbon 15 from carbon 12 and 5 nucleons (H-2 plus H-3) to make make one neutron so the mass of reagents and hydrocarbon would be about equal. tritium costs about 500 times as much as gold - which could be a problem. $\endgroup$ Commented Nov 16 at 19:53
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    $\begingroup$ Also, water is itself a green house gas $\endgroup$ Commented Nov 16 at 19:55
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    $\begingroup$ Regarding greenhouse effects of the water produced by this blast: The atmosphere contains ca. 1.27 × 10^16 kg of water. El Niño events can increase this by 0.5 × 10^15 kg. journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/clim/18/6/jcli-3299.1.xml The mass of a trillion barrels of oil is 1.36 × 10^14 kg. Up to 15% of that is hydrogen. If all that hydrogen reacts with oxygen to produce water (molar weight 18, of which hydrogen contributes 2), we get 1.36 × 10^14 kg × 0.15 × 18 / 2 = 1.836 × 10^14 kg, i.e. about 37% of an El Niño event. Significant, but I guess much smaller long-term effects than CO₂. $\endgroup$ Commented Nov 16 at 22:52
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    $\begingroup$ Physics says: no, this won't work in the slightest. Not at all. You can not adjust bombs like that, not even a neutron beam in a huge test center can be that precise. $\endgroup$ Commented Nov 17 at 0:00
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IMF villain Kurt Hendricks would be proud! (And this is a Frame Challenge.)

In your civilization's effort to rid the world of demonic blood, they destroyed the world. But I'd like to introduce another problem because, rather inconveniently, you didn't explain how you'd set of the nuke.

  1. Below the oil.
  2. Surface blast starting inside a large tank.
  3. Surface blast starting outside a large tank.
  4. Atmospheric blast.

Most, if not all, of the other answers are assuming atmospheric blasts. Let's introduce the idea of a surface blast.

  • Nuclear weapons convert a nearly meaningless amount of mass to energy. So we can statistically assume 100% of the oil is in play.

  • Heat? Oh, yeah, there's a lot of heat... but that heat doesn't exist in a vacuum. It's a nice thought that you could burn all the oil, but you'll end up burning almost none of it. A trillion barrels of oil is a lot of oil.

Barrels, not gallons or liters

  • The only oil that is guaranteed to burn is that oil inside the tank into which you place the nuke. (This all gets worse if you don't put the nuke inside a tank.) Because the first thing the heat will have to get through will be the walls of the barrels and tanks. Which aren't oil.

  • Which means most of the oil is being thrown away by the blast. I'm thinking Mount St. Helens. I'll get to that in a moment.

A trillion barrels of oil is 159x109 liters. A liter of oil will cover 7.5–10 square meters of surface. The surface of the Earth is approximately 5.1x1014 square meters. The oil will cover on average 13.9x1014 square meters.

Congratulations! You just covered the surface of the Earth more than twice over! WOO-HOO! Global genocide and destruction! However much is actually burned by the heat of the nuke is entirely irrelevant!

OK, I'm being a bit specious

Yes, that nuke will spread the oil far and wide. Really far and really wide. But even a 30 Mt nuke can't cast oil around the world. So, what would really happen?

  1. Using the 1980's Mt. St. Helens eruption (approx 24 Mt) as a guide — and knowing that oil is a LOT heavier than ash — most of the oil will find itself within 50 miles of the blast center.

  2. I expect people living +/- 1,500 miles away will experience some oil, but it's hard for me to imagine a significant amount of oil (e.g., enough to seriously affect crops) penetrating more than about 500 miles in any direction. Could be wrong about this, though. In any case, those nearby nations who opted to help your civ horde oil will never forgive them.

  3. Mountains are your enemy (or everyone else's friends). Living on the other side of a mountain will be a definite plus.

  4. The environmental clean up may never be fully accomplished. I can trivially believe breathtaking consequences for your world's oceans. Even a little oil falling over a vast area will have serious consequences.

  5. What did burn, as mentioned in other answers, will create byproducts that will plague the world for decades.

Really, all your civ did was make the whole situation worse by proving once and for all that oil really is the blood of demons.

Is there a way to actually be rid of all that oil?

Oh, there may be bacteria or clever chemistry that could destroy the oil, but trillions of barrels makes both completely inapplicable. You have (IMO) one choice...

Incineration.

And you'd better have a plan for dealing with the combustion byproducts.

But I'll keep using nukes until all the oil is gone!

Congratulations! You just covered the surface of the Earth with radioactive fallout more than twice over! WOO-HOO! Global genocide and destruction! However much is actually burned by the heat of the nuke is entirely irrelevant! And the few people left alive, some of whom will be your your religious zealots, now look like this:

Religious zealots from the movie Beneath the Planet of the Apes
Photo of nuclear missile worshiping zealots from the movie "Beneath the Planet of the Apes"

OK, a surface blast won't work, what will?

Other answers have already pointed out the environmental consequences of an atmospheric blast. That won't spread the oil nearly as much as the surface blast would, but it would ignite the oil, which would be impossible to put out (they don't want to, anyway). But the toxic cloud would probably kill everything on Earth, anyway.

An underground blast would at best ignite the oil. It might not even do that. The deeper the blast, the less effectual it'll be. The closer to the surface you get, the more my surface blast scenario takes over.

Long story, short...

Cool idea unless you want scientific veracity, which I think is really boring. Nuke that oil! But if you insist on scientific veracity... burn, baby, burn. It's your only hope and unless you build a lot of hard-to-hide incinerators, it'll take a generation or two. Even an atmospheric blast would likely take years to burn away all the oil. If it gets it all (despite one or two or three more blasts).

Yes, science be a harsh task master.

I therefore bestow upon you the honorary certificate of the Rule of Cool. Go forth and nuke that oil!

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