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Researchers at KTH have been able to prove that the fossils of animals and plants are not necessary to generate raw oil and natural gas. This result is extremely radical as it means that it will be much easier to find these energy sources and that they may be located all over the world. “With the help of our research we even know where oil could be found in Sweden!” says Vladimir Kutcherov, Professor at the KTH Department of Energy Technology in Stockholm. Together with two research colleagues, Professor Kutcherov has simulated the process of pressure and heat that occurs...

Nano-research on drill cores from the North Sea might help increase extraction rates of oil in Denmark It is a mystery to many people why the world is running out of oil when most of the world’s oilfields have only been half emptied. However some of the oil that has been located is trapped as droplets of oil in small cavities in the surrounding rock or is stuck to the walls of the underground cavity and cannot be accessed by the techniques currently used in the oil industry. Now, new research may have come up with an explanation as to...

But it may not explain the presence of the gas on the Red Planet today.Traces of serpentine found at Nili Fossae on Mars.NASA/JPL/University of Arizona Surprises keep coming from Nili Fossae, a long, deep scar in the surface of Mars. In December last year, scientists reported evidence there for carbonates — minerals that typically form in the presence of water1. Then, in January, reports came that there was a large plume of methane in the area. On Earth the gas is made mostly by animals as a by-product — although it can also be produced naturally in the absence of...

About half of the oil in the ocean bubbles up naturally from the seafloor, with Earth giving it up freely like it was of no value. Likewise, NASA satellites collect thousands of images and 1.5 terrabytes of data every year, but some of it gets passed over because no one thinks there is a use for it.

Saturn's smoggy moon Titan has hundreds of times more natural gas and other liquid hydrocarbons than all the known oil and natural gas reserves on Earth, scientists said today. The hydrocarbons rain from the sky on the miserable moon, collecting in vast deposits that form lakes and dunes. This much was known. But now the stuff has been quantified using observations from NASA's Cassini spacecraft. "Titan is just covered in carbon-bearing material — it's a giant factory of organic chemicals," said Ralph Lorenz, a Cassini radar team member from the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. "This vast carbon inventory...

Saturn's smoggy moon Titan has hundreds of times more natural gas and other liquid hydrocarbons than all the known oil and natural gas reserves on Earth, scientists said today....

The good news is that panic scenarios about the world running out of oil any time soon are wrong. The bad news is that the price of oil is going to continue to rise.... The Peak Oil school rests its theory on conventional Western geology textbooks, most by American or British geologists, which claim oil is a "fossil fuel", a biological residue or detritus of either fossilized dinosaur remains or perhaps algae, hence a product in finite supply. Biological origin is central to Peak Oil theory... In the 1950s, the Soviet Union faced "Iron Curtain" isolation from the West. The...

Saturn's orange moon Titan has hundreds of times more liquid hydrocarbons than all the known oil and natural gas reserves on Earth, according to new Cassini data. The hydrocarbons rain from the sky, collecting in vast deposits that form lakes and dunes. The new findings from the study led by Ralph Lorenz, Cassini radar team member from the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, USA, are reported in the 29 January 2008 issue of the Geophysical Research Letters. "Titan is just covered in carbon-bearing material--it's a giant factory of organic chemicals," said Lorenz. "This vast carbon inventory is an important...

Saturn's smoggy moon Titan has hundreds of times more natural gas and other liquid hydrocarbons than all the known oil and natural gas reserves on Earth, scientists said today. The hydrocarbons rain from the sky on the miserable moon, collecting in vast deposits that form lakes and dunes. This much was known. But now the stuff has been quantified using observations from NASA's Cassini spacecraft. "Titan is just covered in carbon-bearing material — it's a giant factory of organic chemicals," said Ralph Lorenz, a Cassini radar team member from the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. "This vast carbon inventory...

Hydrocarbons bubble up from the mid-Atlantic's Lost City. Deep-sea vents could offer a non-biological source of oil and gas.D. KELLEY & M. ELEND, UNIV. WASHINGTON INST. FOR EXPLORATION/URI-IAO/NOAA/THE LOST CITY SCIENCE TEAM Undersea thermal vents can yield unexpected bounty: natural gas and the building blocks of oil products. In a new analysis of Lost City, a hydrothermal field in the mid-Atlantic, researchers have found that these organic molecules are being created through inorganic processes, rather than the more typical decomposition of once-living material. Most of the planet's oil and natural gas deposits were created when decomposing biological matter is 'cooked'...

Methane on Mars may be produced at rates 3000 times higher than previously thought and partially destroyed by dust storms, controversial new research suggests. The work is sure to reignite the debate over a possible biological origin for the gas, but another team reports that subsurface volcanism alone - and not life - can account for the gas. Sunlight is thought to destroy methane molecules in Mars's atmosphere over about 300 years. So recent discoveries of the gas by space- and ground-based instruments suggested it is actively being replenished by geological processes or – possibly – living microbes. The mystery...

Oil seeping from the seafloor may have contributed to climate change long before the internal combustion engine did. The petroleum deposits are rich in the powerful greenhouse gas methane, which, according to a new study, may have played a major role in two previous episodes of global warming. Bedrock below the ocean bottom keeps a lid on oil reservoirs, but it's not an impermeable cap. Small cracks allow petroleum and methane to bubble to the surface. Once there, the petroleum oxidizes and turns to tar, which sinks. Meanwhile, the methane drifts into the atmosphere, where it makes up about 15%...

Thomas Gold was not your typical radical. Far from being a mad scientist, he was a brilliant professor of astronomy at Cornell University, but he succeeded in driving many others mad with theories that flew in the face of conventional wisdom. His most controversial idea was among his last, and geologists and petroleum experts around the world still rage against Gold for suggesting they were dead wrong in their understanding of how oil and gas are formed in the Earth's crust. Now, a couple of decades after Gold first suggested that hydrocarbons are formed deep underground by geological processes and...

TownHall.com: Conservative Columnists: Larry KudlowQUICK LINKS: HOME | NEWS | OPINION | RIGHTPAGES | CHAT | WHAT'S NEWtownhall.comLarry Kudlow (back to story)October 12, 2001Oil Czar and ally Almost unnoticed in the wave of economic pessimism accompanying the war against terrorism is the precipitous plunge of oil prices. Since shortly after the Sept.11 bombing, oil has dropped about 25 percent from $30 a barrel to nearly $22. Gasoline prices at the pump have slipped $0.20 to $1.30. Just as negative oil shocks act on the economy like tax hikes, this (SET ITAL) tax-cut (END ITAL) like decline will surely boost ...

WASHINGTON, Nov. 27 - Researchers at a government nuclear laboratory and a ceramics company in Salt Lake City say they have found a way to produce pure hydrogen with far less energy than other methods, raising the possibility of using nuclear power to indirectly wean the transportation system from its dependence on oil. The development would move the country closer to the Energy Department's goal of a "hydrogen economy," in which hydrogen would be created through a variety of means, and would be consumed by devices called fuel cells, to make electricity to run cars and for other purposes. Experts...

About Coal America's most abundant energy resource and a source of chemicals, fertilizer, and power worldwide. Bookmarks on this Page Introduction Domestic Resources Domestic Consumption World Resources World Consumption Introduction Coal is the generic name for a solid hydrocarbon substance that has been burned as fuel for hundreds of years. Thanks to technological advances, coal can now be converted into a synthesis gas that can be used as a feedstock for the production of chemicals, fertilizer, and electric power. Webster defines coal as "a black or brownish black solid combustible substance formed by the partial decomposition of vegetable matter...

In an industrial park in Philadelphia sits a new machine that can change almost anything into oil. Really. "This is a solution to three of the biggest problems facing mankind," says Brian Appel, chairman and CEO of Changing World Technologies, the company that built this pilot plant and has just completed its first industrial-size installation in Missouri. "This process can deal with the world's waste. It can supplement our dwindling supplies of oil. And it can slow down global warming." Pardon me, says a reporter, shivering in the frigid dawn, but that sounds too good to be true. "Everybody says...

There is an alternative theory about the formation of oil and gas deposits that could change estimates of potential future oil reserves. According to this theory, oil is not a fossil fuel at all, but was formed deep in the Earth's crust from inorganic materials. The theory was first proposed in the 1950s by Russian and Ukranian scientists. Based on the theory, successful exploratory drilling has been undertaken in the Caspian Sea region, Western Siberia, and the Dneiper-Donets Basin. The prevailing explanation for the formation of oil and gas deposits is that they are the remains of plant and animal...

Other consequences of gas emissions are the dangerous and misleading indications that the flight instruments would provide. Air speed indicators and air pressure altimeters would give quite false and fluctuating readings. The autopilots, programmed for air, may have totally erroneous responses in the light gas, as indeed may the pilots themselves, who would be perplexed by a situation they had never encountered or contemplated before.