Scientist stirs the cauldron: oil, he says, is renewable

Boston Globe | May 22, 2001 | David L. Chandler

[Wu]

And we call tell the Arabs to pack sand...

[spycatcher]

Yeah, actually Gold further developed an idea that had been around since oil was first drilled for 150 years ago. From above -- post 136:

Q: Were there precedents for your idea that deep hydrocarbons are a normal fact of planetary geology?

Gold: In the '60s, Sir Robert Robinson [a Nobel Prize-winning chemist and president of Britain's Royal Society] said that petroleum looks like a primordial hydrocarbon to which biological products have been added.

Q: And what was the response?

Gold: The response was that I quoted his remark in many of my papers. But the profession of petroleum geology did not pick it up. Mendeleyev [the Russian chemist who developed the periodic table] in the 1870s had said much the same thing, but Robinson had done a more modern analysis of oil and had come to the same conclusion. And, in fact, the Russians have in the last 20 years done an even more precise analysis that completely proves the point. The fact that Mendeleyev was in favor of a primordial origin of petroleum had a great effect - you see, to most Russians, Mendeleyev was the greatest scientist that Russia ever had.

[RobFromGa]

There are any number of such explanations which could account for an old field recharging with new oil from below.

Clearly this is the work of the VRWC trying to confuse the Enviro-Nazi's.

[RobFromGa]

600 years ago most folks believed the earth to be flat. They were WRONG!

Could you please post a link to the source for this hypothesis. This is news to me and I'm sure a lot of other FReepers as well.

[nopardons]

?????????????????????????????

[xm177e2]

they'd soon find themselves riding around on camels again

They never stopped ;)

[xm177e2]

Scientist stirs the cauldron: oil, he says, is renewable

I WANT to believe him (I really, really want this theory to be true), but I also want more evidence first.

[Looking for Diogenes]

I'm out of my depth with this topic, but here is a detailed website dealing with the issue.

Hydrocarbon Production From Fractured Basement Reservoirs

[spycatcher]

Thanks. Your link was broken but I found another one here

and the Fractured Basement .pdf file here

[Looking for Diogenes]

Thanks, that's the site I was trying to link to.

[spycatcher]

Interesting quote from p.85 of Gold's Book -- The Deep Hot Biosphere:

"Nobody has yet synthesized crude oil or coal in the lab from a beaker of algae or ferns. A simple heuristic will show why such synthesis would be extremely unlikely. To begin with, remember that carbohydrates, proteins, and other biomolecules are hydrated carbon chains. These biomolecules are fundamentally hydrocarbons in which oxygen atoms (and sometimes other elements, such as nitrogen) have been substituted for one or two atoms of hydrogen. Biological molecules are therefore not saturated with hydrogen. Biological debris buried in the earth would be quite unlikely to lose oxygen atoms and to acquire hydrogen atoms in their stead. If anything, slow chemical processing in geological settings should lead to further oxygen gain and thus further hydrogen loss. And yet a hydrogen “gain” is precisely what we see in crude oils and their hydrocarbon volatiles. The hydrogen-to-carbon ratio is vastly higher in these materials than it is in undegraded biological molecules. How, then, could biological molecules somehow acquire hydrogen atoms while, presumably, degrading into petroleum?"

And from the above link...

Countries With Hydrocarbon Finds In Basement Reservoirs

The reservoirs are organised by continent

Europe
North America
South America
Asia
Africa
CIS and Russia
Middle East
Oceania

Under CIS and Russia: "...more wells have been drilled into crystalline basements within the FSU than all other nations combined with the consequence of greater production. For example, the Caspian district has a total of eighty fields producing from crystalline basements. Unlike the majority of drilling operations which cease as soon as basement rocks are encountered (Aguilera, 1995b), Krayushkin et al (1994) state that all of the hydrocarbon fields within the FSU producing from crystalline basements were developed intentionally."

[m1911]

Oil comes from somewhere.

Whatever natural processes are involved, they have not suddenly ceased because mankind decided to plant wheat, build cities, eat McDonalds, or drive SUVs. Therefore, oil is still being created.

Whatever process creates/raises oil, the question is, is it happening faster or slower than we are using it?

[Looking for Diogenes]

Clearly there are more significant sub-basement finds than the 80 barrels that Gold's Swedish experiment recovered.

[Don Joe]

"and your point is......?"

PKB, naturally.

Thanks for asking.

[Elihu Burritt]

My geology professor at OU maintains that the evidence suggests that oil and natural gas may very well be formed continuously, and that we're not any more likely to run out of petroleum than we are to run out of water or basalt. Could be, could be.

Yes and no. The oil that seems to fill up old fields a bit may actually just be seepage from adjacent areas. One thing for sure, there are lots of old wells that haven't filled up in any really significant way. If it does just come from the earth, the relevant question is how quickly, and most evidence points to it not being all that snappy.

We will never run out of gold, but we will never have as much as we want either. Unless of course we learn to make it at a reasonable price.

And even if we do run out of oil and gas, we can make oil as long as there is oil shale, and that is as common as basalt. Potable water already is another problem though.

[Looking for Diogenes]

Contrariwise, I have found internet info that challenges the abiotic thoery.

"Isoprenoids:
Pristane and phytane are the two predominant isoprenoids found in petroleum products.  They are, in essence, "chemical fossils" from the hydrolysis of chlorophyll and tend to degrade after the straight chain aliphatics. "

The implication is that petroleum contains traces of biotic chemicals, obviating abiotic origins. Other sites mention isotopic ratios as proof of non-abiotic origin.

Perhaps the whole question is a false dichotomy. 'Organic' chemistry appears throughout the solar system, even in places we assume have no life. There may be biotic and abiotic origins to our subterranean hydrocarbon deposits.

Personally, I believe that the petroleum company geologists must have the best appreciation for this murky field. Their corporations have spent more and conducted more surveys and tests than all the universities and governments combined. Unless they are lying I trust their assessment.

(Are they lying?)

[Bigun]

(Are they lying?)

Which would you think more valuable?

1. A finite quantity of material currently in use by almost all of mankind.

2. An infinite quantity of the same material.

[Skywalk]

Actually based on the various disciplines involved in his theories, and being proven correct in many of them, it would seem he is MORE than just one of the most brilliant.

God-like would seem more appropriate:)

[spycatcher]

That's the strange thing. Gold argues that it's highly unlikely that there would coincidentally be two sources for hydrocarbons.

Shouldn't we find millions of tiny pockets of oil wherever we find a fossil? If not, it seems more likely that we would find many pools or lakes of oil on the surface rather than seeing oil travel and pool in a central location deep underground by sinking below heavier water.

With us becoming partners with Russia now and Bush being an oil man, amybe that will allow more information to be shared so we can find out more about what Russia knows and is still finding out from their basement drilling. They're #2 behind Saudi Arabia and have lots of unreleased data collected by excellent scientists.