Posted on 11/19/2001 10:07:24 AM PST by Aurelius
SCIENTIST STIRS THE CAULDRON: OIL, HE SAYS, IS RENEWABLE
David L. Chandler,
Globe staff Date: May 22, 2001 Page: A14 Section: Health Science
It's as basic as the terminology people use in discussing sources of energy: On the one hand, there are "fossil fuels," left over from the decayed remains of millions of years worth of vegetation and destined to run out before long; on the other hand, there are "renewable" resources that could sustain human activities indefinitely.
But what if fossil fuels aren't fossils, but are actually renewable and virtually inexhaustible? To most people, that question may sound as reasonable as asking what if down were up, or the XFL were a big, classy hit. But a handful of scientists, led by the unconventional and always-controversial astronomer Thomas Gold of Cornell University, state just that. Move over, dinosaurs, they say: Petroleum has as much to do with fossils as the moon has to do with green cheese.
Gold's claim, spelled out in a book just out in paperback as well as a talk at the Harvard Coop last week, challenges basic premises of the energy debate, from environmentalists' warning of oil's eventual decline to President George W. Bush's current talk about an energy shortage. Just dig deep enough, Gold says, and almost anyone can strike oil.
As one might expect, most mainstream petroleum geologists view this contrarian point of view with either scorn and derision, or the studied indifference reserved for flat-Earthers.
"We're very familiar with Tommy Gold," said Larry Nation, a spokesman for the American Association of Petroleum Geologists. Geologists in that field, he said, "are more open-minded than you might think. They're a pretty independent bunch, or there wouldn't be so many dry holes." But most of them draw the line at Gold's theory.
At least one successful natural gas geologist, though, has sided with Gold's unorthodox concept, which, in essence, goes like this: Far from being the product of decayed vegetation, petroleum is being manufactured constantly in the Earth's crust. It is made from methane, or natural gas, the simplest of all the hydrocarbon fuels, as it bubbles upward from the depths of the Earth where it has existed since the planet's formation more than 4 billion years ago.
As it rises, the methane is consumed by billions of microbes that exist in a dark netherworld where sunlight never penetrates. While all surface life depends on sunlight, this deep, hidden realm of life - dubbed by Gold as "The Deep Hot Biosphere," which is also the title of his book on the subject - lives on the chemical energy of the methane itself. The biological traces found in all petroleum, he argues, is derived from this hidden form of life, not from the decayed plants usually thought to be petroleum's source.
If Gold's theory is right, then the Earth's "reserves" of petroleum and natural gas may be hundreds of times greater than most geologists now believe. Oil wells that are pumped dry will simply refill themselves as more methane and petroleum works its way upward to fill the emptied spaces in the rock. This has already happened in a few places, geologists agree - something that is hard to explain by the conventional theory, but lends support to Gold's unorthodox view.
Gold's theory "explains best what we actually encountered in deep drilling operations," said Robert Hefner III, a natural gas geologist who has discovered vast gas deposits in Oklahoma over the last three decades, tapped by some of the deepest wells ever drilled. According to conventional theory, it should be impossible for petroleum or natural gas to even exist at such depths, because the pressure and the high temperatures should have "cooked" the hydrocarbons away, Hefner said in an interview yesterday.
Echoing Gold's view, Hefner said that astronomers have found hydrocarbons such as methane on virtually every planet and moon ever studied, as well as the far corners of the universe - places where the conventional view of hydrocarbons forming from decaying remains of living organisms couldn't possibly apply. "It's unlikely [oil on Earth and other planets] got there in two different ways. . . . It probably came from the same place, not from squished fish and dinosaurs."
Few people have been convinced so far. A single test of the theory has been carried out - a pair of wells drilled more than 3 miles deep in Sweden, with results generally seen as inconclusive. Gold had hoped to produce a commercial oil well, which might have cinched his case, but only a few barrels worth of oil came up. He attributes the poor showing to clogging by fine magnetite particles that he said are consistent with his theory.
But Gold is no stranger to being out on a limb with a scientific theory. In 1967, he suggested that newly-discovered pulsing sources of radio emission in the sky were actually rapidly-spinning collapsed stars, called neutron stars. The idea was considered so outlandish that he was not even allowed to speak at a scientific meeting on the subject. Less than a year later, however, his idea had been universally accepted, and remains the textbook explanation for what became known as pulsars.
Not all his ideas have been on target. His prediction that the moon was covered with such fine dust that astronauts might sink right in and be swallowed up once they set foot there caused NASA great - and ultimately unnecessary - anxiety. Gold, however, still maintains that his basic point, that the moon is covered mostly by fine dust rather than solid rock, was actually proved right.
If Gold turns out to be right about "fossil" fuels, then the world will be a very different place: Almost anyplace on Earth could become an oil producer just by drilling deep enough, and petroleum won't ever run out in the foreseeable future.
But nobody's betting on it at this point. "Most petroleum geologists don't agree with his theory," Nation said. "But it's fun to talk about."
David Chandler can be reached by e-mail at chandler@globe.com.
The origin of oil remains only a theory, and probably will always remain so, at least for our lifetimes. We can't recreate it in the labs so far. The best theory we have so far is that it was created from organic matter, usually decayed sea life, fish poop, and other nutrients which are continually deposited in the mud off the former coastline. As land masses lifted and sunk over the eons, the beaches continually moved inward or further out into the ocean. The beaches would create sand deposits which would bury the mud. The same principle would repeat itself many times.
The weight and pressure of the repeated deposits transformed the mud into shale, and the coastline into sandstone. Reefs were buried and compressed.
Somehow, over time, the organic material in the shales was tranformed into oil and gas which began seeping toward the surface. In those places where it was trapped in porous rocks or reefs, it has stayed until we find it today.
I think your offer, COB1, of a steak dinner for someone who can find deep oil is safe. If the Gomez field near Pecos, Texas, was gas then all such deep wells will be. The Permian Basin has cool rocks. Other places don't even have natural gas at those depths. It's so hot that the only gas that can exist is hydrogen sulfide (a few whiffs and you're dead) and carbon dioxide.
The idea that oil somehow survived those temperatures and moved up to shallow traps is fairly ridiculous.
I agree, Dog Gone.
Thank you for sharing your knowledge.
Go here: OFFICIAL BUMP(TOPIC)LIST
and then click the topic to initiate the search! !
Bump
Are posts being randomly removed from this thread?
I haven't seen anything wrong with any of them.
Please don't break out the tin-foil but Immanuel Velikovsky reasoned that there was vastly too much petroleum for it to have come from fossil sources and wondered at the mechanism that could turn flesh and bone into oil. Instead, he reasoned, it seems much more likely to have condensed with the other constituent elements and compounds that formed the earth and was as randomly distributed as gold deposits.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.