Free Republic
Browse · Search
News/Activism
Topics · Post Article

To: orionblamblam
A more accurate review of Kenney's work appeared in The Economist ("The Argument Needs Oiling," The Economist, August 15, 2002).
" Millions of years ago, tiny animals and plants died. They settled at the bottom of the oceans. Over time, they were crushed beneath layers of sediment that built up above them and eventually turned into rock. The organic matter, now trapped hundreds of metres below the surface, started to change. Under the action of gentle heat and pressure, and in the absence of air, the biological debris turned into oil and gas. Or so the story goes.
In 1951, however, a group of Soviet scientists led by Nikolai Kudryavtsev claimed that this theory of oil production was fiction. They suggested that hydrocarbons, the principal molecular constituents of oil, are generated deep within the earth from inorganic materials. Few people outside Russia listened. But one who did was J. F. Kenney, an American who today works for the Russian Academy of Sciences and is also chief executive of Gas Resources Corporation in Houston, Texas. He says it is nonsense to believe that oil derives from "squashed fish and putrefied cabbages." This is a brave claim to make when the overwhelming majority of petroleum geologists subscribe to the biological theory of origin. But Dr Kenney has evidence to support his argument.
In this week's Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, he claims to establish that it is energetically impossible for alkanes, one of the main types of hydrocarbon molecule in crude oil, to evolve from biological precursors at the depths where reservoirs have typically been found and plundered. He has developed a mathematical model incorporating quantum mechanics, statistics and thermodynamics which predicts the behaviour of a hydrocarbon system. The complex mixture of straight-chain and branched alkane molecules found in crude oil could, according to his calculations, have come into existence only at extremely high temperatures and pressures-far higher than those found in the earth's crust, where the orthodox theory claims they are formed.
To back up this idea, he has shown that a cocktail of alkanes (methane, hexane, octane and so on) similar to that in natural oil is produced when a mixture of calcium carbonate, water and iron oxide is heated to 1,500° C and crushed with the weight of 50,000 atmospheres. This experiment reproduces the conditions in the earth's upper mantle, 100 km below the surface, and so suggests that oil could be produced there from completely inorganic sources."
Kenney's theories, when discussed at all, are universally described as "new," "radical," and "controversial." In truth, however, Kenney's ideas are not new, nor original, nor radical. Though no one other than Kenney himself seems to want to talk about it, the arguments that he presented in the PNAS study are really just the tip of a very large iceberg of suppressed scientific research.
55 posted on 03/15/2005 10:03:37 AM PST by clearsight
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 39 | View Replies ]


To: clearsight

Is there some reason why you chopped the article up?

Regardless, it does not change the fact that the petrochemical industry uses geologists who use trace fossils and knowledge of how theEarth has changed over millions of years to locate oil. While it is certainly possible that oil may be made in part deep in the Earth... the fact is, the "formed from critters" theory of oil production has been successfully used to *find* oil for decades. Oil formed deep in the Earth cannot explain this.


56 posted on 03/15/2005 10:27:28 AM PST by orionblamblam
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 55 | View Replies ]

To: clearsight; orionblamblam
Here's an abstract by Dr. Kenney.
76 posted on 03/15/2005 11:42:55 AM PST by <1/1,000,000th%
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 55 | View Replies ]

Free Republic
Browse · Search
News/Activism
Topics · Post Article


FreeRepublic, LLC, PO BOX 9771, FRESNO, CA 93794
FreeRepublic.com is powered by software copyright 2000-2008 John Robinson