Anybody ever read that book by Thomas Gold, theorizing that oil is a by-product of microbial activity and is therefore a renewable resource? Excerpt of interview below:
INTERVIEWER: Your most controversial idea is the non-biological origin of natural gas and oil. You put forth the position that dinosaurs and plants and the fossils from those living beings are not the origin of oil and natural gas. Your theory was first publicly referenced in a book by your colleague, the late Fred Hoyle, one of the world’s leading physicists and astronomers, in which Hoyle had a chapter entitled “Gold’s Ore Theory,” the ore referring to the porous spaces in the Earth. What first prompted you to suggest that oil and natural gas is generated from a chemical substance in the crust of the Earth?
GOLD: The astronomers have been able to find that hydrocarbons, as oil, gas and coal are called, occur on many other planetary bodies. They are a common substance in the universe. You find it in the kind of gas clouds that made systems like our solar system. You find large quantities of hydrocarbons in them. Is it reasonable to think that our little Earth, one of the planets, contains oil and gas for reasons that are all its own and that these other bodies have it because it was built into them when they were born?
INTERVIEWER: That question makes a lot of sense. After all, they didn’t have dinosaurs and ferns on Jupiter to produce oil and gas?
GOLD: That’s right. Yet, for some reason my theory was not heard. The old theory that it was all made from fossils had become so firmly established that when the astronomers had perfectly definitive evidence on most of the other planets, it was just ignored, especially by the petroleum geologists who had, by then, called these things “fossil fuels.” So once they had a name, then every body believed it.
INTERVIEWER: The oil geologists have carved a niche for themselves and they are perceived now to “know more” about how oil was supposedly formed from dinosaur bones than anybody. However, you have taken your theory (which argues against the traditional theory) and have gone one step further by saying that there is a biosphere; that living entities (fungi, microbes, etc.) are not necessarily just the ones we see on the surface of the Earth but that living creatures are deep in the Earth which could have given rise to creatures on the surface.
GOLD: I will tell you why this had to be so and why I became convinced. In the whole petroleum and coal story, there is this extraordinary paradox that all of these substances contain some biological material. But the chemistry in detail fits it better, as many chemists have said, with the theory of a primordial hydrocarbon mixture (say an oil or gas mixture) to which biological products have been added. That was one aspect that has been quite firmly noted by many Nobel laureate chemists and others.
INTERVIEWER: So every time they find oil deep in the ground and they analyze it chemically, they are effectively supporting your theory?
GOLD: Absolutely. That has been known, also, for quite a large number of years since the mid-1950s.
INTERVIEWER: Human skull fossils have been found in anthracite coal in Pennsylvania. The official theory of the development of coal will not accept that reality, since human beings were not around when anthracite coal was formed.
GOLD: That’s right. Coal was formed millions of years ago.
INTERVIEWER: However, you cannot mistake the fact that these are human fossils. Nonetheless, your theory explains how this could come about.
GOLD: The La Breatarpits in Los Angeles have saber toothed tigers and all kinds of things in them. But the only thing which, at the present time, you can see anything that would make coal of the kind that we mine (usually at a very shallow level) are the big tar pits and tar lakes, such as the one at La Brea and ones in Trinidad.
The coal we dig is hard, brittle stuff. It was once a liquid, because we find embedded in the middle of a six-foot seam of coal such things as a delicate wing of some animal or a leaf of a plant. They are undestroyed, absolutely preserved, with every cell in that fossil filled with exactly the same coal as all the coal on the outside. A hard, brittle coal is not going to get into each cell of a delicate leaf without destroying it. So obviously that stuff was a thin liquid at one time which gradually hardened.
The only thing we find now on the Earth that would do that is petroleum, which gradually becomes stiffer and harder. That is the only logical explanation for the origin of coal. So the fact that coal contains fossils does not prove that it is a fossil fuel; it proves exactly the opposite. Those fossils you find in coal prove that coal is not made from those fossils. How could you take a forest and mulch it all up so that it is a completely featureless big black substance and then find one leaf in it that is perfectly preserved? That is absolute nonsense.
INTERVIEWER: Where then does the carbon base come from that produces all of this?
GOLD: Petroleum and coal were made from materials in which heavy hydrocarbons were common components. We know that because the meteorites are the sort of debris left over from the formations of the planets and those contain carbon in unoxidized form as hydrocarbons as oil and coal-like particles. We find that in one large class of meteorites and we find that equally on many of the other planetary bodies in the solar system. So it’s pretty clear that when the Earth formed it contained a lot of carbon material built into it.
INTERVIEWER: Your book points out that there are all sorts of life forms within the Earth.
GOLD: It was an unthinkable thing, when this discovery was made, that there were life forms that did not depend on life on the surface, such as the process called photosynthesis where we find chemical energies created from the sunlight. That had been thought to be the only way life was to be supported. And here we find gasses and liquids coming up from cracks in the ocean floor which feed enormously intense forms of life, which includes quite large creatures. It is only because we found and saw some of these large creatures that this was discovered. However, the principal things that are living there are microbial, which feed the large creatures.
INTERVIEWER: To verify your theories, you participated in the drilling of an unusual oil well in Sweden. Please tell us about that.
GOLD: I was responsible for initiating the drilling of two quite deep wells in a huge meteorite crater in central Sweden. The reason I was interested in that was be cause it was in pure granitic rock with not a stitch of any sediment—nothing biological, just hard brittle rock.
To the average oil geologist that kind of area would be a wasteland.
They thought I was absolutely crazy to get the Swedes to drill there.
We were not able to produce commercial quantities of oil, because of the bacteriological content which clogged up the wells, but the bacteria which were living there were on the oil that was coming up. The bacteria that were captured at the various levels were just exactly those that would only reproduce at the elevated temperatures that, of course, occur at the various levels. There was no question that these were microbes from down there that were living, in fact, on the oil and gas as their principal food source and that this was their supply of energy.
Let me tell you why I was convinced. We first pulled up 80 barrels of oil, so this was not just trace amounts. Yet, I had been told by I don’t know how many traditionalists that this was an absolutely mad place to look for oil.
Meanwhile, based on the Swedish results, the Russians have drilled 300 deep holes in granitic rock of this type in Russia and found oil in most of them. The White Tiger field off the coast of Vietnam is producing at a very good rate now from granitic-based rock, so we know that this whole story is correct.
-snip-
The University of New Hampshire is conducting tests on that very theory. They have a process worked out to produce oil from microbes and have suggested that we turn the Salton Sea in California into a giant oil-producing "farm" using oil-extruding microbes.
I assume that if you beleive the late T. Gold's theories, you're out making BILLIONS and BILLIONS of dollars pumping this oil out of the ground at >$50/bbl. Unfortunately, companies like EOM, PetroBras, Aramco and Shell aren't making a penny listening to debunked theories like his... If they really wanted to make any money, they would ALL be drilling in granite to find this deep oil. Glad to see they're all bankrupt...
Have you ever seen seismic of the White Tiger field off Vietnam or the other highly fractured granite fields off Lithuania? Both look like shattered glass... Surround a bunch of fractured granite with shale source rock and apply a seal. Guess what eventually fills the fracture space...
One of MANY articles debunking the late Thomas Gold:
http://www.energybulletin.net/2423.html
http://www.energybulletin.net/2741.html
http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/100404_abiotic_oil.shtml
http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/012805_no_free_pt3.shtml
Thomas Gold, theorizing that oil is a by-product of microbial activity and is therefore a renewable resource
Anybody ever read that book by Thomas Gold, theorizing that oil is a by-product of microbial activity and is therefore a renewable resource?Why - heck yes!
I've posted his theory several times in the past couple of years!
You'll also find, upon investigation, that the Russians accuse Thomas of plagiarism - seems they had done a lot of research in this area prior to Gold publishing some of his work.