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In a world running low on oil, several countries are still sitting on massive supplies. If only they could get to them. The Ferdows, Mound, and Zageh Fields Location: The Persian Gulf, off the coast of southern Iran Estimated Reserves: 38 billion barrels Details: Discovered in 2003, these three interconnected fields are among the largest oil deposits ever found. Ferdows is the largest, with 30.6 billion barrels. This figure may seem astounding, but it’s usually not possible to extract all the oil from a field due to technological and financial constraints. Plus, assessing how much oil these deposits can actually...

You’ve heard that we’re running out of oil. You’ve heard that natural gas has a finite and ever-shortening supply. The media has been reporting on Peak Oil for decades, and the peak has always been just around the next corner. But what if that weren’t true, and for practical purposes, the US has an unlimited supply of fossil fuel for its energy needs? Would that not undercut the entire notion of an energy crisis, except as self-inflicted?Get ready for a paradigm change, courtesy of … Salon? (via Ace) Are we living at the beginning of the Age of Fossil Fuels,...

U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Secretary Steven Chu contributed a statement to an announced breakthrough in research into tapping the vast fuel resource of methane hydrates that could eventually bolster already massive U.S. natural gas reserves.As Al Fin pointed out yesterday natural gas is priced to a barrel of oil equivalent at about $10-$11 per the estimable Geoffrey Styles view, something less than 10% of the cost of oil. For North Americans adding a viable and hopefully low cost means to make use of gas hydrates could be giant boost to low cost fuel sources and a massive kick to...

LONDON -- Scientists have discovered vast quantities of hydrogen gas, widely regarded as the most promising alternative to today's dwindling stocks of fossil fuels, lying beneath the Earth's crust. The discovery has stunned energy experts, who believe that it could provide virtually limitless supplies of clean fuel for cars, homes and industry. Governments across the world are urgently seeking ways of switching from conventional energy sources such as coal, gas and nuclear power to cleaner, safer alternatives. Energy specialists estimate that oil production will start to decline within the next 10 to 15 years, as the economically viable reserves start...

President Barack Obama and his green energy confederates are determined to scare the public about a declining supply of "fossil fuels." If we accept the idea that oil is produced by the conversion of organic matter -- from plants to dinosaurs -- under extreme pressure, we must also accept the idea that there is a limited supply of oil and that we've got to do everything we can to find a replacement for fossil fuels before we run out. The evidence is mounting that not only do we have more than a century's worth of recoverable oil in the United...

In the West it is almost universally held that all oil and gas is derived from fossils. This is not the case elsewhere, particularly among Russian and Ukrainian scientists who have, over several generations, tenaciously propounded the notion that oil and gas are abiotic, can be found deep below the surface of the earth in most parts of the world and in very large amounts. Western geologists and scientists find the theory either annoying or amusing and refuse to consider it seriously although there are exceptions. The theory continues to be held in much higher regard by Russian scientists and...

Evidence of Earth's first continents — 4.3-billion-year-old "diamonds" — are actually just fragments of polishing grit, a new study finds. In 2007, an international team first reported discovering the tiny gems, which hid in pockets inside zircon crystals from Western Australia's Jack Hills, in the journal Nature. But it turns out that the gems weren't actually diamonds, but polishing paste, smushed into hairs'-width cracks when the zircons were prepared for laboratory tests, according to a study published online in the Feb. 1, 2014, edition of the journal Earth and Planetary Science Letters.

On the seafloor just off of the U.S. East Coast lies a barely known world, explorations of which bring continual surprises. As recently as the mid-2000s, practically zero methane seeps — spots on the seafloor where gas leaks from the Earth's crust — were thought to exist off the East Coast; while one had been reported more than a decade ago, it was thought to be one of a kind. But in the past two years, additional studies have revealed a host of new areas of seafloor rich in seeps, said Laura Brothers, a research geologist at the U.S. Geological...

A 100 kilometre-wide crater has been found in Greenland, the result of a massive asteroid or comet impact a billion years before any other known collision on Earth.

File this under: What don’t we know?We just discovered slice “2″ is alive.  |1 – Continental crust | 2 -Oceanic crust | 3 – Upper Mantle | 4 – Lower Mantle | 5 – Outer Core | 6 – Inner Core | Image Credit: Dake You might have thought that photosynthetic life forms had the Earth covered, but according to some researchers the largest ecosystem on Earth was just discovered and announced last Thursday, and it’s powered by hydrogen, not photosynthesis.The Oceanic Crust is the rocky hard part under the mud that lies under the ocean. It covers 60% of...

Enlarge Image Whack here. By taking great care to eliminate possible contamination of rock samples -- including sterilizing the outer surfaces of rocks and then removing their outer layers to expose fresh material within—researchers found the strongest evidence yet that microbes live deep within the sea floor. Credit: Jesper Rais/AU Communication Samples drilled from 3.5-million-year-old seafloor rocks have yielded the strongest evidence yet that a variety of microorganisms live deeply buried within the ocean's crust. These microbes make their living by consuming methane and sulfate compounds dissolved in the mineral-rich waters flowing through the immense networks of fractures in...

Have our wishes been answered? Scientists have found an oil field which contains 200 times more hydrocarbons than there is water on the whole of the Earth. Time to wave peak oil goodbye forever … but before you do I should probably inform you of the tiny hiccup in any plan to develop this oil field. It is around 1,300 light years away. The scientists work at the Max Planck Institute in Germany, and using the 30m-telescope of the Institute for Radio Astronomy they discovered a vast cloud of hydrocarbons within the Horse Head Nebula galaxy in the Orion constellation.

A new study demonstrates how high hydrocarbons could be formed from methane deep within the Earth, aside from the compression and heating of ancient animal remains over the eons. Fused-methane oil would be far less common than your typical petroleum, of course, but the study shows abiogenic hydrocarbons could conceivably occur in some of the planet’s high-pressure and high-temperature zones. Scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory used supercomputers to simulate what would happen to carbon and hydrogen atoms buried 40 to 95 miles beneath the Earth’s crust, where they would be subjected to prodigious pressures and temperatures. They found at...

Methane is M.I.A. on Mars. Back in 2009, NASA announced some pretty astounding observations from Mars. They thought they'd spotted signs of methane in the red planet's atmosphere, which would force astronomers to contemplate the possibility of biological activity on Mars. NASA's Curiosity rover hasn't made any close encounters of the third kind yet, and after analyzing Mars' atmosphere, turned up no traces of methane. The rover used its Sample Analysis at Mars to measure atmospheric composition for the first time today, and while more tests need to be conducted to determine methane presence definitely, it's not looking good for...

Ground-based observatories and proposed-but-cancelled spacecraft such as the European Space Agency's Darwin project or NASA's Terrestrial Planet Finder could scan the atmospheres of exoplanets for signs of extraterrestrial life. Molecules each absorb specific types of light, resulting in patterns known as spectra that allow scientists to identify what the molecules are. Some chemicals or combinations of chemicals might be unique to life as we know it, and could thus serve as strong evidence of aliens. One key gas astrobiologists looking for extraterrestrial life would concentrate on would be oxygen, since researchers often think this molecule is too chemically reactive to...

How long are we going to continue referring to oil as Fossil fuel when we have known for many (Many) years that oil as we know it comes not from Dinosaurs etc but rather from "other" organic materials such as "trees" etc. Animals that die (including dinosaurs) do not leave a trace of "oil" when they die. They putrefy, dehydrate and turn to dust, leaving only their bones to be discovered later on. Yes there are fossils in the La Brea Tar Pits and many other such surface Tar Pits around the world but that is because animals fell in...

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....The evidence is mounting that not only do we have more than a century's worth of recoverable oil in the United States alone (even if there is a limit to the earth's oil supply), but that we also actually have a limitless supply of Texas tea because oil is in fact a renewable resource that is being constantly created deep under the earth's surface and which rises upward, where microscopic organisms that thrive in the intense pressure and heat miles below us interact with and alter it. In other words, we have an unending supply of oil, some of which...

There’s some good coming off China’s extensive coal exploitation (the nation holds the top place for most pollutant emissions resulting from burning coal), as recent mining activities around Wuda in Inner Mongolia, China, has uncovered an almost perfectly preserved 298 million year-old forest. The forest, which also features intact trees with leaves, branches, trunk and cones, was buried by volcanic ash, and thus kept away from time’s unforgiving touch. The researchers dubbed the forest the “Pompeii of the Permian period, since the manner in which it was preserved bared a striking resemblance to the famous Roman namesake event. The volcanic...

Horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing used in 30-year-old, waterflooded oil fields has boosted production per well from 25 to 300 barrels per day. The new frontier for the unconventional gas technology is in old oil fields. This is a huge opportunity for using long laterals, multiple-stage fracs and smaller, high-tech fractures, said George King, global technology consultant, at the NAPE Business Conference on Feb. 22 in Houston. “Right now, we have two big oil plays -- the Bakken and Eagle Ford. What if you take the name shale off of it? There are three or four more big plays coming...