Posted on 12/02/2005 7:00:55 PM PST by seastay
New study shows methane on Saturn's moon Titan not biological NASA scientists are about to publish conclusive studies showing abundant methane of a non-biologic nature is found on Saturn's giant moon Titan, a finding that validates a new book's contention that oil is not a fossil fuel.
"We have determined that Titan's methane is not of biologic origin," reports Hasso Niemann of the Goddard Space Flight Center, a principal NASA investigator responsible for the Gas Chromatograph Mass Spectrometer aboard the Cassini-Huygens probe that landed on Titan Jan. 14. Niemann concludes the methane "must be replenished by geologic processes on Titan, perhaps venting from a supply in the interior that could have been trapped there as the moon formed."
The studies announced by NASA yesterday will be reported in the Dec. 8 issue of the scientific journal Nature.
"This finding confirms one of the key arguments in 'Black Gold Stranglehold: The Myth of Scarcity and the Politics of Oil,'" claims co-author Jerome R. Corsi. "We argue that oil and natural gas are abiotic products, not 'fossil fuels' that are biologically created by the debris of dead dinosaurs and ancient forests."
Methane has been synthetically created in the laboratory, Corsi points out, "and now NASA confirms that abiotic methane is abundantly found on Titan."
The realization that hydrocarbons are produced inorganically throughout our solar system was a key insight that led Cornell University astronomer Thomas Gold to write his 1998 book, "The Deep Hot Biosphere: The Myth of Fossil Fuels." Gold wrote:
It would be surprising indeed if the earth had obtained its hydrocarbons only from a source that biology had taken from another carbon-bearing gas – carbon dioxide – which would have been collected from the atmosphere by photo-synthesizing organisms for manufacture into carbohydrates and then somehow reworked by geology into hydrocarbons. All this, while the planetary bodies bereft of surface life would have received their hydrocarbon gifts by purely abiogenic causes. Gold wryly noted that he was sure there had not been any "big stagnant swamps on Titan" to produce the biological debris that conventionally trained geologists think was required on Earth to produce oil and natural gas as a "fossil fuel."
"If petroleum and natural gas are abiotic as we maintain in 'Black Gold Stranglehold,'" Corsi commented, "then the 'peak oil' fear that we are going to run out of oil may have been based on a giant misconception."
Paradigms in science change slowly and with great resistance, he noted, "But NASA has given us today incontrovertible evidence that Titan has abundant inorganic methane."
"If the scientists have ruled out that biological processes created methane on Titan, why do petro-geologists still argue that natural gas on Earth is of biological origin?" Corsi asked.
At one time the Middle East was covered by shallow seas and lakes, of course.
ROFLMAO.
Corsi CLEARLY does not mean plankton whe he says "vegetation" in this most recent article, when you look at his previous work.
Here's a previous article of his posted on FR:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1527613/posts
"The problem is that according to conventional "Fossil-Fuel" theory, dinosaur fossils and ancient forests are supposed to be found in sedimentary rock, not bedrock.... If oil is found where no dinosaurs or ancient forests ever were, then the "Fossil-Fuel" theory may end up having been a fiction all along."
Corsi clearly LITERALLY thinks that the mainstream Fossil Fuel theory he's attacking holds that oil comes from dinosaurs and ancient forests. It's very clear he's completely unaware of what the ACTUAL mainstream fossil fuel theory is and has been for decades upon decades.
It's simply fact that Corsi is an incompetent imbecile who has written a book in a scientific field where he hasn't actually read anything by people that know anything about the field; he's attacking a straw-man non-existent "fossil fuel" theory he got from cartoons.
I tried to avoid big words in the above as much as I could for you; you may want to read slowly, but I think you'll get it eventually.
Actually there is a second possibility; that Corsi isn't a moron, and that he actually DOES know about the actual Fossil Fuel theory of petroleum generation, but he's simply deliberately lying about it and mistrepresenting it because he thinks it makes his arguments sound better to the scientifically uneducated audience of WingNutDaily.
"At some point, the amount of oil found will not keep up with the amount being used"
You have given no reason to think this must be the case. As more oil is used and more money is made in the industry, more resources are mobilized to finding additional oil. Techniques are improved, searches extended, theoretical understanding increases, etc.
As an energy budget matter, all human energy use is still only a fraction of known, lasting sources of input power (sun and radioactive decays and core cooling etc). The form that takes (mere heat, chemically stored, biomass, the exact mix etc) is an unknown.
And incidentally, the peak oil theory is a claim about absolute production, not production relative to use. And there is no sign to date of oil production declining. It is higher now than it has ever been. Those promoting it rest everything on distinctions among field sizes, which is an inherently murky measure, since it is essential an arbitrary net of distinctions thrown over an amorphous blob of data (are these ten wells in one field or in ten or in five?)
Naturally the easiest stuff to find is found before harder stuff to find. But there is no a priori reason to think the unfound stuff has to be a smaller volume overall. It is by definition unfound.
You repeatedly yelled at forum posters for saying oil came from vegetation, insisting that it came from plankton instead. But Plantkon IS vegetation (and animals).
That makes you at least as scientifically ignorant as the author. Even more funny, you say that anyone who thinks oil came from vegetation is "proundly stupid". So you are calling yourself profoundly stupid, since you think oil came from plankton (vegetation). Thank you mr. science!
You're yelling at everyone about how wrong and ignorant they are, but you are the one who is wrong and ignorant. That's really funny! Always fun to see this in the forum.
Dinosaurs and forests are animals and vegetation. Plankton is composed of animals and vegetation. The point of the article is abiotic vs biotic source of oil. If oil is found where no animals and vegetation existed, then the biotic source theory of oil may be wrong.
You're doing an excellent job educating the skeptics on this thread, but there is one thing you mentioned that I would like to discuss. Perhaps you can educate me.
Your statement above is generally correct, I believe, but I suspect there are exceptions. In the US most terrestrial source matter produces coal and gas. But not always. I thought there were oils believed to be sourced from terrestrial kerogen.
Overseas, there are a number of oils thought to be sourced from coals, a terrestrial source material. Here is a link to papers on coal-based oils: Coal Based Oils.
It is possible, of course, that the coals that generate oil might perhaps be coals that formed in lagoons next to the ocean and thus might contain some marine input or only limited amounts of the lignins thought by some to prevent oil formation.
Why is it that oils generated after flowering land plants evolved contain trace chemical biomarkers (i.e., molecular "fossils" like oleanane) thought to come from the the flowering plants? Could that flowering plant material simply have washed out to sea where it combined with oil-prone marine source matter?
Inquiring minds want to know.
As long as the economic incentives are there, that will continue until eventually, there will be no place left to drill we have not.
Improvement in efficiency just means that more marginal resources become exploitable, but that does not 'make' more oil, it just makes some available which would not have been otherwise.
That comes at a cost, and economic factors apply, but at some point, even the most efficient extraction methods will have extracted all that can be removed from the reservoir.
As for reason to think that eventually we will not be able to keep up with the depletion of known reservoirs by discovering new ones?
Yep I do have reason to believe this. I have been working in the industry for 26 years, and recognize that oilfields we have come to take for granted since the '50s either have depleted or are beginning to decline.
There is a reason OPEC, especially Saudi Arabia, cannot drop the price of oil to the point exploration is less lucrative--they no longer have the excess production capacity to control the price that well, especially in the face of increasing global demand. They can create a shortage, but not a glut.
You note increased understanding as one of the keys to avoiding an eventual shortage, but that only comes with experience. Apparently, you are unfamilliar with the industry, which is notorious for boom and bust cycles which have kept tremendous numbers of people scurrying for the security of a steadier employment market. THere are a few of us die-hards who stick it through, but far, far more who do not. Especially in times like these, experienced personnel are at a premium.
Once someone is ensconced in a secure position, home every night, with only a 40 hour workweek, they probably are not coming back to the oil patch, especially if they still feel the sting of the layoffs that came with the last bust cycle.
Last, there are only a finite number of hydrogen and carbon atoms to string into useful chains, and I doubt that natural processes are outstripping our ability to break those molecules up.
Note, I am not addressing when, per se, this 'peak' will occur, only that it will, and the greater the demand for petroleum, the sooner it will happen.
So, in the lab you can destroy the large HC molecules and it turns into gas; can you reverse the process and turn the gas back into oil?
I mean, what if that is part of the process for creating the oil; as it filters up from the hotter core depths, it is transformed into the heavier molecules of oil?
I'm not an expert - even though I've stayed at a Holiday Inn Express - I'm just posing the question.
an absurd hypothesis from the get go - the thought that thousands of feet under water and thousands of feet into the sunken dirt beneath it there were once vast land masses covered with forests and animal life.
I don't believe there is any known natural process that would turn natural gas into oil. At some point high pressure deep in the earth might force the formation of more compact molecular arrangements (one molecule from two), but the high temperatures found with those high pressures would act to tear those big molecules apart.
The conversion of gas to oil can be done chemically, but it is not economical. Finding an economical process that does that has been a holy grail of catalytic chemists. Consider all the Fischer-Trops research that has been done over the years.
One thing the proponents of natural formation of oil from gas would have to explain is how all the many molecular remnants of organic source matter get into the oil. I'm talking about things like the porphyrins that are remnants of the chlorophylls, bacterial cell wall remnants, flowering plant remnants, etc.
Does the newly formed oil that supposedly forms from gas at depth simply dissolve these molecular fossils out of the kerogen in shales on its way to the surface? Or are the molecular fossils formed from the diagenesis/catagenesis of the kerogen in source rocks?
I think the great, great majority of organic geochemists who have studied these questions for years believe the latter is the case.
I know of one case where oil thickened when it got shallower. I think the tar sands in Canada were formed when oil formed out of kerogen below migrated up to shallow depths and bacteria ate the lighter components of the oils at or near the surface. Bacteria can generally digest small side chains or straight chain molecules. When an oil biodegrades, the most resistant compounds are those with complex structures that the bacteria can't eat.
Nothing of the sort.
We have known for over 100 years that the primitive atmosphere of earth was methane, but that has little or nothing to do with petroleum today, though it may bear on deep ocean hydrates and some natural gas deposits.
Wow!! Interesting article! The thought had crossed my mind as well, that fossil fuels may not be fossil.
"maybe they will find aliens eating in taquerias on Titan, that would explain the methane"
If only OUR illegal aliens were all eating at those same taquerias on Titan....
"are already past" or "have already passed" are both correct forms of the phrase, your conclusions aside.
However, Vega, headed right for our hood ornament will have blasted through long before then, and the Andromeda galaxy, also headed directly for us, will have passed through the Milky Way strewing confusion throughout.
We are probably producing natural gas and oil from the wells far, far faster than it is being replaced, although it is being replaced--not much question of that.
There is so much hydrogen and methane in the bodies beyond Mars, none of it of biological origin, that it would be a surprise if earth's natural gas, and even oil, were entirely biologically produced. Some, of course, but the crust of the earth and even deeper could contain a fraction of hydrogen and methane, as well as carbon present since earth was formed. It would gradually move upward and some would be trapped in rock formations. We are probably drawing off the natural gas now far faster than it is percolating upward.
Some do use petroleum products. Atlas burns kerosine; Delta burns hydrogen.
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