Posted on 02/13/2008 4:02:35 PM PST by Names Ash Housewares
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 is an important window into the geology and climate history of Titan."
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
In hindsight, “gas station” was not the best way to express things.
Future deep space natural energy resource might have been better.
Ethane and methane are not oil. The title is incorrect. They cannot be used to make gasoline or diesel.
Then I look at the incredible amounts of money being made by Dubai and companies like Exxon-Mobil by ripping us off, and it suddenly makes sense.
Thanks, that makes more sense.
Perhaps because the only commercially producing petroleum ever discovered and is flowing today is all sourced from sedimentary rock and contains biomarkers.
There have a few attempts to drill and locate abiotic oil. Those wells have only been successful in producing cash from gullible investors and a couple times gullible governments. None have resulted in oil production.
Yes. Seems like there was a lively discussion about this in a topic last year, but anyway...
Thanks FN for the ping to the similar, earlier topic:
Titan’s surface organics surpass oil reserves on Earth
SpaceRef.com | February 13, 2008 | ESA
Posted on 02/13/2008 2:10:35 PM EST by Brian S. Fitzgerald
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1969802/posts
From your link, it appears that the hydrocarbon claim was for Venus rather than an ice-cold blob like Titan.
From the link:
I offered a series of claims that naturally followed from the reconstruction. In science they are usually called predictions, but I prefer to term them advance claims. Thus I claimed that Venus, due to its recent birth and dramatic though short history, must be very hot under the clouds, nearly incandescent, and gives off heat—it has not reached thermal balance; that it must have every massive atmosphere; that the atmosphere consisted largely of hydrocarbons but that if oxygen is present petroleum fires must be burning—thus explaining also the present massive carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere; that sulfur and iron (ferruginous pigment) must be present too; and that if the same catalytic process that took place on the Earth when it was enveloped by clouds of Venus’ origin takes place in Venus’ own clouds, they must consist mainly of organic material infused with sulfur and iron molecules. Further, I considered that Venus was disturbed in its rotation.
http://www.spitzer.caltech.edu/Media/happenings/20061010/
Planets, Comets, Asteroids, hydrocarbons everywhere...
From its lofty perch in space, Spitzer was in the perfect position to scrutinize the cometary material ejected from comet Tempel 1. The sensitive telescope’s spectrometer instrument detected dust particles finer than human hair, and discovered the presence of silicates (crushed rock or sand), carbonates (chalk), smectite (clay), metal sulfides (like fool’s gold), amorphous carbon (soot), and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (carbon-rich molecules found on barbecue grills and in automobile exhaust on Earth).
http://www.universetoday.com/2007/07/06/spongey-hyperion-coated-with-hydrocarbons/
One of the most bizarre objects in the Solar System has got to be Saturn’s moon Hyperion. From the pictures taken by Cassini, this tiny moon looks like a sponge you might buy at the Body Shop. In a new research paper appearing in the July 5 issue of the journal Nature, scientists have mapped the surface of Hyperion, and found hydrocarbons...
What this means is oil is being made NOW as we speak deep in the earth under tremendous pressure. Methane (one of the most common materials in the universe) is being turned into oil.
This story shatters the myth of peak oil. The proof is that oil reserviors that were capped off 20 to 30 years ago are refilling themselve from deep below the eaths surface.
They're everywhere!!!
Many of V's "advance claims" are slowly but surely being proven. I for one am glad he fought the good fight for all the years he and his work were maligned by the "scientific community". Such sleazy behavior from a seld-described group of those avowing the scientific method was, and still is, atrocious.
What will Nissan think of next?
Har!
The laws of thermodynamics don't reverse under high temperature and pressure. Complex hydrocarbon molecules like octane and heptane break down into components like ethane and methane. They do not do the reverse.
This is why a refinery can crack or further process heavy hydrocarbons into lighter, but they do not take methane and create octane for transportation fuel.
This is not a system so The laws of thermodynamics do not apply here. Unless you count us burning it and somehow returning it to the depth of the earth. Which is not occuring.
The methane down there was deposited when the earth formed and is still there today: Hence NO SYSTEM=NO LAW OF THERMO-wotchacallits.
Under high temperature and pressure, carbon in the form of coal can phase shift into a diamond and still be carbon.
Why can’t the same logic apply here? High heat and high pressure chemically change metane into a carbon phase called oil and we just haven’t figured it out yet.
PS in a refinery the molecule chains are seperated according to their lengths according the amount of heat at that level in the cracking tower.
They don’t break down chemically they just seperate acording to heat applied
If you are the Lord God Almighty, you can suspend the laws of thermodynamics. If not, they are going to continue to exist and simple hydrocarbons will not form up into complex hydrocarbons in the presences of heat and pressure. They will however, do the opposite.
Under high temperature and pressure, carbon in the form of coal can phase shift into a diamond and still be carbon.
Yes, under heat and pressure, carbon can form four other bonds with adjacent carbon atoms in a crystaline structure. Under similar conditions we manufacture industrial diamonds today. Because we know and understand the process, we can reproduce it by first reaching pressure-temperature points above the Berman-Simon line on the phase diagram for carbon
Why can’t the same logic apply here?
Because carbon-to-carbon covalent bond in a crystaline structure are not the same types of bonding. However, because we understand how heat and pressure affect complex hydrocarbons, we use them to manufacture our fuels.
In a refinery, we use heat and pressure to BREAK DOWN complex hydrocarbons, usually in the presence of catalysts, to create smaller, more valuable hydrocarbons. In this way, we recover gasoline and diesel from heavier products left over from the initial distillation of crude oil.
High heat and high pressure chemically change metane into a carbon phase called oil
No, they don't.
and we just haven’t figured it out yet.
Yes we have. We use the process all over the world in refineries.
in a refinery the molecule chains are seperated according to their lengths according the amount of heat at that level in the cracking tower.
They don’t break down chemically they just seperate acording to heat applied
No, the distillation columns separate the different carbon strings into multiple products. The cracking process is "cracking" larger hydrocarbon molecules into smaller ones. Also reformers and cokers perform similar functions.
Please read through the following link for a overview of a refinery process.
Oil Market Basics, Refining
http://www.eia.doe.gov/pub/oil_gas/petroleum/analysis_publications/oil_market_basics/refining_text.htm
A primer on oil markets combined with hotlinks to oil price and volume data available on the Internet
Office of Oil and Gas, Energy Information Administration
Dinosaurs on moons? get out! /Src
You seem like a smart guy. Can you read this and give me yor 2 cents?
PS The reason I think the laws of thermo don’t apply here as it doesn’t “appear to be a closed system 30k below the earths crust.
Thax Ken
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