New evidence supports 19th century idea on formation of oil and gas

American Chemical Society ^ | Nov 4, 2009 | Unknown

[decimon]

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 between carbon dioxide and hydrogen below Earth' surface.

The new study describes a test of that idea, which dates to at least 1877 and famous Russian chemist Dimitri Mendeelev. They combined ingredients for this so-called abiotic synthesis of methane, the main ingredient in natural gas, in a diamond-anvil cell and monitored in-situ the progress of the reaction. The diamond anvils can generate high pressures and temperatures similar to those that occur deep below Earth's surface and allow for in-situ optical spectroscopy at the extreme environments. The results "strongly suggest" that some methane could form strictly from chemical reactions in a variety of chemical environments. This study further highlights the role of reaction pathways and fluid immiscibility in the extent of hydrocarbon formation at extreme conditions simulating deep subsurface.

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ARTICLE FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE "In Situ Diamond-Anvil Cell Observations of Methanogenesis at High Pressures and Temperatures"

DOWNLOAD FULL TEXT ARTICLE http://pubs.acs.org/stoken/presspac/presspac/full/10.1021/ef9006017

CONTACT: Anurag Sharma, Ph.D. Geophysical Laboratory Carnegie Institution of Washington Washington, D.C. 20015 Phone: 202-478-7975 Fax: 202-478-8901 Email: asharma@ciw.edu

[Sherman Logan]

Don’t claim to have all the answers, but we probably have the early stages of coal and possibly oil/gas production going on right now in peat bogs around the world. Here’s the Wiki entry for peat.
http://74.125.113.132/search?q=cache:5M4ai7XvIEgJ:en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peat+peat&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us

We’re talking very large volumes.

I am fully open to the idea of abiotic production of natural gas and somewhat less so to oil. Coal it seems pretty clear is fossil in origin.

[mountn man]

Problem is, whether in pools or suspended in the pores of rock, oil still has volume. Billions of barrels of oil, still require trillions of barrels of volume of mass, to be crushed, pressurized and percolated.

With each multi billion barrel oil reserve, it would take multi trillion barrels of organic life to produce.

So how many hundreds of oil deposits have billions of barrels of oil, that originally came from a trillion barrels of organic mass?

And how many times would sudden life ending/changing events have had to happen to make JUST THESE possible?

What about the organic material that was lost? What are the possibilities that each deposit is made up of the majority of the organic material at the time? Wouldn't it be more plausible that the organic material now called oil, is just a small fraction of the organic material at the time of encapsulation? Meaning there was much greater amount of organic material to begin with, that never got changed, but simply decayed.

[decimon]

Both the organic and discreet chemical processes described in the article require high pressures and heat to produce oil.

[mountn man]

Coal, by itself I could accept. But when you add the mass of vegetation required for coal, gas, peat, oil, and anything else, I have a hard time grasping All the SUDDEN trappings of organic life, in such large quantities, at so many different times.

[mountn man]

Problem is, its not in a few places. Its in quite a number of places. Meaning the trappings of large numbers of plants and animals, SUDDENLY, has happened numerous times.

[thackney]

But the article only talks about the formation of Methane based on starting with CO₂ and H₂. It does not discuss forming the long-chain (higher-energy) molecules found in oil. It is an important distinction.

[wolf78]

When an oil field is 5 miles below the surface of the earth, 1000's of feet in depth and miles across, thats an AWFUL LOT of trees and animals to be packed into an area.

Except coal is from forests, oil is from oceans, i.e. plankton.

When plants and animals die, they decompose into dust and dirt. What prevented normal decomposition, that allowed heat and pressure to do its thingy versus decomposition?

Hogwash. Dust and dirt, i.e. the mineral content is just a few percent. Most is carbon, oxygen and hydrogen. Hydrogen and oxygen evaporate partly as water, carbon together with hydrogen and oxygen is consumed by other animals and plants (ever heard of carbs?), turned into CO2, which together with the water nourishes new plant life. If you now take the biomass, remove it from the circle of life, heat and pressurize it, you get hydrocarbons like crude oil and natural gas (fossil) or synthetic biomass-to-liquid fuels (industrial).

What isolates the biomass from the natural recycling process is twofold: In the case of forests and moors it's a continuous process, some biomass is always lost to the ground. In the case of ocean plankton it's the deep sea environment with high pressure and low oxygen.

If you'd take the Amazon forest and INSTANTLY covered it, crushed it, and heated it, the trees and plants and animals would crush down to about a foot thick, not 1000's of feet.

If you repeat the cycle for hundreds of thousands / millions of years, you only need a few milimeters (not even a foot) per year to get to the amount of oil there is today.

If the origin in biological, one would expect to find remains of clearly biological origin, but perhaps heat and pressure could eradicate the evidence. If the origin is not biological, some biological “contamination” might still have occurred. Perhaps the “science” on this would still focus on the prevalence or relative absence of biological material, and the use of judgment.

That science has been done decades ago. The composition of petroleum, especially of trace elements contained in the petroleum like sulfur etc. strongly suggests a biological origin. Also the location of oil fields relative to the historic location of oceans suggests a biological origin. That doesn't mean that abiotic hydrocarbons don't exist. It just means that large-scale abiotic generation of petroleum is very, very unlikely.

Sherman Logan is a 100% correct.

[SunkenCiv]

Thanks hennie pennie. Thomas Gold ping. Thanks decimon for posting the topic.

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[R W Reactionairy]

There is much more coal than oil in terms of stored energy.

The processes for abiotic natural gas appear a lot more likely than for abiotic oil.

Finally, it does not make much difference how it is made. In addition to oil you still need a large enough trap [cap rock to keep it from rising — and something to keep it from migrating further horizontally] and suitable reservoir rock [porous and permiable] at a depth no so deep as to cook down the oil to have an economically viable deposit.

[R W Reactionairy]

The oil shales [actually kerogen in marlstones mostly — or so I have been told] of the Green River three corners area of Colorado, Wyoming and Utah are an oil deposit in the making. These shales would need to be burried more deeply to cook down the kerogen; sealed off from migrating to the surface and then accumulate in a trap .... and voila, an oilfield.

For most oil deposits, geologists can identify with someconviction [perhaps incorrectly but with conviction] the source rocks for the oil.

[bigheadfred]

Nice opener.

[PBinTX]

I’m not sure of the point you are trying to make. As a geologist, I’m just saying that what we observe is not unusual. How much organinc matter exists of the face of the earth? How much algae, how many microbes, how much plant, insect, and animal matter? These are among the building blocks of hydrocarbons. Imagine the volume of organic life that dies and is replaced each year then multiply that times a few billion years. The volume is incalcuably large.

You don’t need a “sudden life ending/changing event” to make this happen. Normal day-to-day processes make it happen. For example, organic matter washes into a river. The river deposits the organic and inorganic matter (sand, silt, and clay) in a submarine delta, and those organic-rich deposits pile up over the millenia. These layers of material are buried over time, and with heat and pressure, the organic material is converted to hydrocarbons. Over time these hydrocarbons seep until they are trapped by denser rock above them, and lo and behold you have a oil reservoir. No magic or mystery, just lots of time and natural processes.

Yes the volume of organic matter that is trapped and becomes oil is likely a tiny fraction of the organic matter produced, most of which decays and becomes CO2 and methane. You have to understand that it doesn’t happen all at once, it takes millions of years. If you only collected a gallon of organic matter a year, in a million years you’d have a million gallons. You have to get over the belief that any of this happens suddenly.