Posted on 11/06/2015 4:46:41 AM PST by expat_panama
Ever since M. King Hubbert in the 1950s convinced a lot of people with his "peak oil" theory that production would collapse and we'd eventually exhaust our crude supplies, the clock has been running. And running. And it will continue to run for some time, as technology and new discoveries show that there's still an ocean of oil under our feet.
[snip]
A BP official told the magazine that "energy resources are plentiful. Concerns over running out of oil and gas have disappeared."
Things are so good, in fact, that Engineering and Technology says "with the use of the innovative technologies, available fossil fuel resources could increase from the current 2.9 trillion barrels of oil equivalent to 4.8 trillion by 2050, which is almost twice as much as the projected global demand." That number could even reach 7.5 trillion barrels if technology and exploration techniques advance even faster.
This information backs up the idea that Earth is actually an oil-producing machine. We call energy sources such as crude oil and natural gas fossil fuels based on the assumption that they are the products of decaying organisms, maybe even dinosaurs themselves. But the label is a misnomer. Research from the last decade found that hydrocarbons are synthesized abiotically.
In other words, as Science magazine has reported...
[snip]
But for now, enjoy our cheap, abundant and efficient "fossil" fuels.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.investors.com ...
How about 6,000 years? ;-)
Yeah. So is global warming. :-)
Given that over 99% of all organic matter rots or is eaten, and not fossilized, or buried, or pressurized, we have already used, and mined, more oil than could have been created merely by organic means.
Let me put it this way. Seeing is believing.
All of the oil I have seen in nearly 40 years in the exploration industry has been associated with or migrated from sediments containing biological material.
Of the couple of wells I know which were based on abiotic models, all that got produced was money from investors. Such ventures have failed for lack of petroleum.
I'm not saying it couldn't happen somewhere, but that (abiotic oil) just isn't what we have been bringing out of the ground.
Identification of Microfossils are used in the oil industry.
http://www2.fiu.edu/~kpanneer/lab_assignment/Lab4_Microfossils.pdf
Do you understand how much oil has been produced, and how that relates to the biotic mass on the earth over 400 million years?
What a show. That would be something to see.
Then you believe in the Tooth Fairy, too.
Burn it piecemeal in vehicles and manufacturing, or wait for volcanics/techtonics to burn it in one giant ice age producing ELE eruption!
I’m a, Noah’s flood produced all of the oil, believer.
What happens on the Earth's dry surface is not the same as on the abyssal plains, the trenches (subduction zones), and the deep ocean ridges. We're only producing from the continental shelves, past and present, and a few on-continent basins.
How can we even estimate the amount of plankton present in, say, the Ordovician or the Mississippian? We only have a small part of the puzzle.
Actually, the conditions CAN be reproduced in a laboratory, using methane (natural gas), catalysts, and considerable pressure and heat.
Methane was one of the precursors of the present atmosphere on earth, with ammonia, water vapor and carbon dioxide being the others. The fact that many comets are made up of various combinations of these gases has been confirmed by observation of passing cosmic debris that has passed through our solar system, and examination of the spectra produced when the meteors are warmed enough by solar “wind” indicates the phenomenon is fairly common.
Under relatively low heat and considerable pressure, carbon dioxide behaves like a solvent beneath the earth’s crust, and in this crucible, the methane is formed into longer and longer hydrocarbon chains, which are generally classified as “kerogen”, a mixture of stable hydrocarbons. Methane also has a peculiar physical state, in which it combines with water at very low temperatures to form “methane ice” or Methane Hydrate. At great ocean depths, this substance lies in great deep layers at the ocean’s floor. As sediment comes drifting down, this substance is trapped in sedimentary layers, eventually becoming combined into the longer and longer hydrocarbons as outlined above.
Over the eons, the sedimentary layers on the former ocean floor get thrust to or near the surface, where the seep can be seen as a thick tar-like or even coal substance, and only when it was discovered that this black tar or gunk was an excellent source of fuel for combustion, was there born incentive to utilize this resource in much greater quantity, awakening the current Industrial Age.
There is no such thing as “peak petroleum”. It is being continuously regenerated.
Damn!
now I will need to spend the morning in study of the piece you provided
Thanks!!
Hmmm
The earth produces over 100 million tons per year in organic carbon.
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/281/5374/237
100 billion tonne of crude oil has been produced since 1850 and that the average annual production rate is less than 700 million barrels per year (2008)
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/05/090507072830.htm
So all the oil produced so far represents less than 3/10,000 of 1% (0.0003%) of the organic mass in that time frame.
And yet people are convinced they know exactly the process that is occurring in every well and instance.
The thought even crossed my mind as a young teenager in California schools when they told us how all crude oil came from dinosaurs. They would even go so far in the textbooks to illustrate a diagram showing a pocket of oil underground and with a trex skull floating in it.
Even then, I thought... “for all the oil we have been using for roughly 100 years, how have we not already run out?” The epiphany hit me then that maybe oil doesn’t just come from old dinosaurs.
Do your own search on microfossils in petroleum and you will have years worth of study.
That's an impressive bit of posted information. It's all sciency and stuff. ;o). You seem credible. I have, in the past read theories that biological decay is not the only source of hydrocarbon production. I'm on D-Fence. Is there any research or speculation on the rate at which the process you explain produces the hydrocarbons?
The next obvious challenge is a technilogical one. When eventually it may be needed, the tectonic plates will not bring those deposits to us, we'll need to go get them. We are already doing some deep ocean drilling. But how deep do we have to go and do we have the technology to get at it today?
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