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DEEP UNDERWATER, and deeper underground, scientists see surprising hints that gas and oil deposits can be replenished, filling up again, sometimes rapidly. Although it sounds too good to be true, increasing evidence from the Gulf of Mexico suggests that some old oil fields are being refilled by petroleum surging up from deep below, scientists report. That may mean that current estimates of oil and gas abundance are far too low. Recent measurements in a major oil field show "that the fluids were changing over time; that very light oil and gas were being injected from below, even as the producing...

IT'S crawling with life down there. A remote expedition to the deepest layer of the Earth's oceanic crust has revealed a new ecosystem living over a kilometre beneath our feet. It is the first time that life has been found in the crust's deepest layer, and an analysis of the new biosphere suggests life could exist lower still. On a hypothetical journey to the centre of the Earth starting at the sea floor, you would travel through sediment, a layer of basalt, and then hit the gabbroic layer, which lies directly above the mantle. Drilling expeditions have reached this layer...

A newly discovered type of oil-eating microbe is suddenly flourishing in the Gulf of Mexico. And the microbe works without significantly depleting oxygen in the water, researchers led by Terry Hazen at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory ... the bacteria may have adapted over time due to periodic leaks and natural seeps of oil in the Gulf.

The Gulf of Mexico ecosystem was ready and waiting for something like the Deepwater Horizon blowout, and seems to have made the most of it, a new scientific study suggests. Petroleum-eating bacteria - which had dined for eons on oil seeping naturally through the sea floor - proliferated in the cloud of oil that drifted underwater for months after the April 20 accident. They not only outcompeted fellow microbes, they each ramped up their own internal metabolic machinery to digest the oil as efficiently as possible. The result was a nature-made cleanup crew capable of reducing the amount of oil...

The oil and gas that fuels our homes and cars started out as living organisms that died, were compressed, and heated under heavy layers of sediments in the Earth's crust. Scientists have debated for years whether some of these hydrocarbons could also have been created deeper in the Earth and formed without organic matter. Now for the first time, scientists have found that ethane and heavier hydrocarbons can be synthesized under the pressure-temperature conditions of the upper mantle —the layer of Earth under the crust and on top of the core.The research was conducted by scientists at the Carnegie Institution's...

Washington, D.C. are reporting laboratory evidence supporting the possibility that some of Earth's oil and natural gas may have formed in a way much different than the traditional process described in science textbooks. Their study is scheduled for Nov./Dec. issue of ACS' Energy & Fuels, a bi-monthly publication. Anurag Sharma and colleagues note that the traditional process involves biology: Prehistoric plants died and changed into oil and gas while sandwiched between layers of rock in the hot, high-pressure environment deep below Earth's surface. Some scientists, however, believe that oil and gas originated in other ways, including chemical reactions between carbon...

They paved paradise and, it turns out, actually did put up a parking lot. A big one. Some 700 feet deep in the waters off California's jewel of a coastal resort, Santa Barbara, sits a group of football-field-sized asphalt domes unlike any other underwater features known to exist. About 35,000 years ago, a series of apparent undersea volcanoes deposited massive flows of petroleum 10 miles offshore. The deposits hardened into domes that were discovered recently by scientists from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) and UC Santa Barbara (UCSB). Their report—co-authored with researchers from UC Davis, the University of Sydney...

If I may, I would like to rebut or add a little objectivity to the flood of “Peak Oil” articles circulating around. When I see another crisis looming in the balance, and dramatized articles that warn of the “Dangers of Peak Oil,” I must question the validity or how this will effect the world, the USA, and you and I personally, and if indeed a crisis is at hand. As for world oil, if you ask the right questions, there are several new technologies/methods/alternatives and new finds that can easily supply enough hydrocarbon fuel for the next century or more....

AOL News (March 4) -- Scientists have uncovered a powerful source of a leading greenhouse gas that is venting into the atmosphere at unprecedented rates. The permafrost beneath the East Siberian Arctic Shelf, a relatively shallow section of the Arctic Ocean, has been pumping 7.7 million tons of methane into the air each year -- roughly the amount released into the atmosphere by the rest of the world's oceans combined. The researchers, who report their work in the March 5 issue of Science, caution that their findings in this previously unstudied region raise more questions than answers. The amount of...

Earth's chemical energy powered early life through 'the most revolutionary idea in biology since Darwin'For 80 years it has been accepted that early life began in a 'primordial soup' of organic molecules before evolving out of the oceans millions of years later. Today the 'soup' theory has been over turned in a pioneering paper in BioEssays which claims it was the Earth's chemical energy, from hydrothermal vents on the ocean floor, which kick-started early life. "Textbooks have it that life arose from organic soup and that the first cells grew by fermenting these organics to generate energy in the form...

Isotope geochemistryEarly water on Earth Geologists have long thought that Earth’s first 500 million years were as hot as Hades, dubbing this time frame the Hadean. The high temperatures would have prevented liquid water from condensing on the surface. But new findings on zircon grains, Earth’s oldest known terrestrial materials, suggest that the Hadean might have hosted liquid water. Recovered from the metamorphosed sediments of the Jack Hills in western Australia, the zircon grains are dated to be more than 4 billion years old and are the only geological evidence available to provide insight into the first 500 million years...

The surprising increase in methane concentrations millennia ago, identified in continental glacier studies, has puzzled researchers for a long time. According to a strong theory, this would have resulted from the commencement of rice cultivation in East Asia. However, a study conducted at the University of Helsinki's Department of Environmental Sciences and the Department of Geosciences and Geography shows that the massive expanse of the northern peatlands occurred around 5000 years ago, coincident with rising atmospheric methane levels. After water vapour and carbon dioxide, methane is the most significant greenhouse gas, resulting in about one fifth of atmospheric warming caused...

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 every year, but some of them get passed over because no one thinks there is a use for them. Scientists recently found black gold bubbling up from an otherwise undistinguished mass of ocean imagery. Chuanmin Hu, an optical oceanographer at the University of South Florida, St. Petersburg, and colleagues from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the University of Massachusetts–Dartmouth (UMass), found that they could...

Scientists in Washington, D.C. are reporting laboratory evidence supporting the possibility that some of Earth's oil and natural gas may have formed in a way much different than the traditional process described in science textbooks. Their study is scheduled for Nov./Dec. issue of ACS' Energy & Fuels, a bi-monthly publication. Anurag Sharma and colleagues note that the traditional process involves biology: Prehistoric plants died and changed into oil and gas while sandwiched between layers of rock in the hot, high-pressure environment deep below Earth's surface. Some scientists, however, believe that oil and gas originated in other ways, including chemical reactions...

A team of scientists based at the Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden have made a "revolutionary" discovery about how hydrocarbon is formed, learning that animal and plant fossils are not necessary to form crude oil.> The article, titled Methane-derived hydrocarbons produced under upper mantle conditions, and published in Nature Geoscience, states that "Whether hydrocarbons can also be produced from abiogenic precursor molecules under the high-pressure, high-temperature conditions characteristic of the upper mantle remains an open question. It has been proposed that hydrocarbons generated in the upper mantle could be transported through deep faults to shallower regions in the Earth’s...

More bad news for the Peak Oil doomsday cult. Russian boffins say they have proved that fossil fuels can be created synthetically by replicating the high pressure, high temperature conditions found in the upper parts of the Earth's crust. The scientists, at the Lomonosov Moscow State Academy of Fine Chemical Technology and the Royal Insitutue of Technology in Stockholm published their work in June. Under conditions of the upper mantle of the Earth's Crust, methane reacts to produce ethane, propane and butane. It means fossils aren't needed to produce oil and gas. While the raw materials to produce synthetic fuels...

Letter abstract There is widespread evidence that petroleum originates from biological processes1, 2, 3. Whether hydrocarbons can also be produced from abiogenic precursor molecules under the high-pressure, high-temperature conditions characteristic of the upper mantle remains an open question. It has been proposed that hydrocarbons generated in the upper mantle could be transported through deep faults to shallower regions in the Earth's crust, and contribute to petroleum reserves4, 5. Here we use in situ Raman spectroscopy in laser-heated diamond anvil cells to monitor the chemical reactivity of methane and ethane under upper-mantle conditions. We show that when methane is exposed to...

The researchers, led by Dr Chris Ballentine from the University of Manchester, concluded that meteorite bombardment, after the moon was first formed, was the only way gases could have arrived so deep within the Earth -- craters on the moon attest to the ferocity of this process... "So we asked the question, `why do volcanoes still spew out gases from so deep, to this day?'" The team sampled volcanic gases in New Mexico. Uniquely, volcanic gases here contain very little air contamination and this allowed the team to measure rare gas isotopes, like neon, for the first time. These isotopes...

Could Deep Source Hydrocarbons Migrate Up Into Oil and Gas Reservoirs? The oil and gas that fuels our homes and cars started out as living organisms that died, were compressed, and heated under heavy layers of sediments in the Earth's crust. Scientists have debated for years whether some of these hydrocarbons could also have been created deeper in the Earth and formed without organic matter. Now for the first time, scientists have found that ethane and heavier hydrocarbons can be synthesized under the pressure-temperature conditions of the upper mantle —the layer of Earth under the crust and on top of...

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...