The Oil Scarcity Myth

Townhall.com ^ | March 17, 2012 | Bob Beauprez

[Kaslin]

Rapidly rising gas prices at the pump have turned up the heat on Barack Obama.  Interestingly, the Administration that just three years ago said it was committed to policies that would cause energy prices to “skyrocket” and get our gas prices “to the levels in Europe,” now says there isn’t much they can do about rising costs to consumers.

One of the many falsehoods that the President and his anti-fossil fuel allies like to perpetuate is that the U.S. is about run out of reserves.  “But you and I both know that with only 2% of the world’s oil reserve, we can’t just drill our way to lower gas prices – not when we consume 20% of the world’s oil,” Obama said yet again in his weekly radio address last Saturday.  He repeatedly makes this less-than-truthful claim to obsessively press his anti-oil and gas agenda and justify wasting billions on green energy fantasies. 

Obama's basis for his 2%-of-the-world's-oil-reserves claim is the narrow definition of “proven reserves” – a measure based on currently producing fields only, rather than identified but undeveloped known reserves which are far more vast. The 22 billion barrels of “proved” reserves, according to the federal government’s Energy Information Administration “are a small subset of recoverable resources.”  Obama conveniently forgets to mention that part.  That he knowingly repeats the less than truthful claim for the purpose of perpetuating a misconception is shameless. 

Various reports from Obama’s own government including the Energy Department, the Congressional Research Service, and the Energy Information Agency as well as a plethora of private analyses tell a dramatically different story.  To be sure, technological challenges, cost of extraction, and political barriers will prohibit some part of the oil buried deep beneath the earth from being harvested, but Obama's representation is pure baloney and he knows it.  For a detailed summary of a more accurate assessment of our reserves click here for a feature story from today’s Investor’s Business Daily.  If you want the condensed version in graphic form, see below.  Please take note that Obama would have you believe all we have left is depicted by the tiny red triangle at the top of the pyramid.

Courtesy of Investor's Business Daily

[editor-surveyor]

Great post!

[RegulatorCountry]

My tongue in cheek theory: the dinoaur population was largely comprised of herbivores, and if modern vegans teach us anything, it’s that herbivores are very gassy. All the dinosaur farts caused global warming, which was beneficial and led to even more dinoaurs and more methane.

Until, one day an asteroid came along, igniting all the methane and blowing dinosaur carcasses plumb underground from the intense shockwave. Natural gas is therefore ancient dinosaur farts, and crude oil is what is left of the dinosaurs, what with all the mushing that occurred when they were slammed underground. They were pretty well pureed and blackened by the searing heat.

Heck, it makes more sense than some leftist envirobabble, lol.

[editor-surveyor]

>> “Sorry but you’ll not draw me into an argument, I’ve been in the business for over 40 year’s and you’ll not change my opinion.” <<

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Way to go! - Don’t let them confuse you with truth and facts.
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[Dusty Road]

Since they’ve posed neither I guess I won’t have to worry about that.

[aruanan]

Thanks. I’ll keep transcribing that paper.

[aruanan]

The fact that oil sample produce fossil molecules is another tell.

There is little in oil that supports a biogenic origin. The little that is there is more likely from remains of bacteria that feed on oil. The levorotatory effect in petroleum is too slight for it to have come from living matter.

[aruanan]

Next installment of the Kropotkin paper referenced earlier (together with the Introduction, skipped earlier):

INTRODUCTION
The idea that oil has an inorganic genesis was first formulated and substantiated experimentally in the works of chemists M. Berteleau (1866), A. Biasson (1871), D. Kloetz, and most comprehensively in the works of D. I. Mendeleyev between 1877 and 1897. Medeleyev reported his theory at a meeting of the All-Russian Chemical Society in 1877 and later expounded it in the monograph Foundations of Chemistry, a classic work of that time. In Mendeleyev's article on oil in the Encyclopedic Vocabulary by Brockhaus and Efron (1897) we find the same arguments on the deep, inorganic origin of oil that are still used up to the present time: connection of the oil fields with deep crustal faults that act as channels for outgassing of the Earth, the presence of abnormally high gas pressures in some layers, inducing the gushing of oil, the presence of carbonaceous compounds including bitumens in meteorites, and in the deep Earth, the presence of a reducing environment, implied by inclusions of reduced iron in volcanic rocks. Treating the manganese-doped iron, containing 8% carbon, with hydrochloric acid, Mendeleyev obtained "a liquid mixture of hydrocarbons, which, according to its taste, its appearance and reactions is identical with natural petroleum." In 1897-1911 experimental studies of the inorganic synthesis of oil were carried out by A. Moisan, K.V. Kharichkov and other chemists. (6)

(Previous quoted section about Koudryavtsev goes here)

BOIKO
In the theory of an organic origin of petroleum it was considered that oil is formed in deposits rich in biotgenic organic matter, the so-called "source rocks", at temperatures not exceeding 300 to 500 uC. A decisive fact against this theory came from the determination of the temperature of formation of oil from quantitative relations of isomers of identical chemical composition. Such studies were performed by G.E. Boiko, who considered the relations for the best studied isomers from 322 oils from various oil fields of the world, and the results of these analyses were published between 1950 and 1957. The relations for these isomers in the hydrocarbon system depend mainly on temperature. "The results obtained have shown that in all oils of the world, the isomers of aromatic hydrocarbons are in relative proportions corresponding to the equilibrium at the temperature of approximately 1600 to 1800 u K [apparently the degree symbol is coming out as a u with a caret, these values in K correspond to 1327 to 1527 C] and pressures of 2 to 4 x 10³ MPA (3, pp. 39-42). Based on experimental data and thermodynamic computations, G.E. Boiko came to the conclusion that the synthesis of oil takes place in the upper mantle at depths of 40-160 kilometers. In any case it could not be synthesized within the sedimentary blanket where temperatures and pressures certainly do not correspond to the isomeric relations characteristic of all oils.

EIGENSON
A. S. Eigenson came to analogous conclusions, based on mathematical modeling of the thermodynamics and the chemical composition of hydrocarbon systems, and he presented this in three papers. In these papers the following quantitative evidence for the abiogenic origin are given: the presence in some layers of oils and gas condensates of excessive amounts of methane; the absence of any traces of very high molecular weight substances like kerogen; the S/C ratio in most oils is many times greater than that of biomass (up to 75 atoms of sulfur to 1000 atoms of carbon in the Rosel-Point oil as compared to 0.7 in the biomass; more or less constant N/S ratio of oils in each area. Excessive abundance of sulfur compared to that in biomass is encountered also in gas systems. According to Anisimov, there are natural hydrocarbon gases known with H₂S content up to 78 to 98 mole concentration (9, 1991, p. 19).

A. S. Eigenson underscored the inconsistency of the argumentation for the biogenic origin of oils based on the presence in them of so-called molecular fossils. "Hunt considers as a typical molecular fossil the porpyrins that are a closed bridge structure of four pyrol rings which can readily produce complexes. Such derivatives of porphyrin as a magnesium complex are contained in chlorophyll of green plants and as complexes of valence two iron are contained in hemoglobin and cytochrome. But many items regarding this assumed molecular fossil remain unconsidered. First of all, in no oils even traces of iron and magnesium complexes have been found, but only vanadium and nickel ones. In 1967 Hodgeson and Baker published results on the formation of porphyrins and the action of electric discharge (simulated lightening [sic]) upon the gaseous mixture of a simulated paleo-atmosphere. The same authors have discovered porphyrins in the the organic part of the Orgueil meteorite."

[Inserted comment here: Orgueil is one of five known meteorites belonging to the CI chondrite group (see meteorites classification), this being the largest (14 kg). This group is remarkable for having a composition that is essentially identical to that of the sun, excluding gaseous elements like hydrogen and helium.

Because of its extraordinarily primitive composition and relatively large mass, Orgueil is one of the most-studied meteorites. One notable discovery in Orgueil was a high concentration of isotopically anomalous xenon called "xenon-HL". The carrier of this gas is extremely fine-grained diamond dust that is older than the solar system itself, known as presolar grains.]

"There are a number of other proofs of the possibility of abiogenic synthesis of both porphyrins and other compounds which had been identified with confidence as molecular fossils, for example isoprenoids." (9, 1991, p. 19).

GOLD
The discovery of oil, deep in the Baltic Shield, may be considered a decisive factor in the hundred year old debate about the biogenic or abiogenic origin of oil. This discovery was made in deep wells that were drilled in the central part of the crystalline Baltic Shield, on the initiative of T. Gold. N. A. Koudryavtsev had attracted attention to the outflow of oil in the middle of the Precambrian shield in the annular structure of the Siljan Lake region of central Sweden. (7). In the opinion of some geologists this structure is an ancient paleozoic impact crater, in the opinion of others it is a paleo-volcano. In this structure there remained small sedimentary deposits of Ordovician age, up to 300 meters thick. Oil in small amounts was obtained there in the 18th century from wells. Because the thickness of the sedimentary rocks in the sites of the oil is so msall, N.A. Koudryavtsev believed that the oil comes from the Precambrian granite-gneiss basement. Sources of methane with admixtures of heavy hydrocarbons from the basement in the Baltic shield have been known for a long time in the Khibines area and in a number of oil fields of Sweden. Paraffin oils resembling those in crude oils were found at depths of 8.4 to 9.4 km in the Kola super-deep well, and bitumens were encountered along the whole section.

To be continued.

[editor-surveyor]

Thanks!
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[crusty old prospector]

These esteemed explorationists. Have they ever even found a barrel of the stuff or did they just sit around and use big words? There may be, for whatever reason, some Precambrian oil in Russia. But after looking at countless basement penetrations myself, I have never seen anything that would resemble COMMERCIAL hydrocarbons. There are traces of gold in my stool but that doesn’t make it an ore deposit. OK, that was a bit over the top but I am too lazy to backspace. Anyway, I think we have beaten this topic down and I am moving on to better threads, like where the Obamao’s are going on their next vacation and what Bill o’Reilly said on The View. I am staying in the Phanerozoic.