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 rest is just economics & politics. - And all costs are relative.
Its possible we may be seeing right now the political costs of oil cartels/artifical shortages.
A 50mix50 mi hole is comparably in area to the figure I quoted for Great Salt Lake in my post 48.
He's brilliant at self-promotion and self-delusion.
Gold knows jack-squat about petroleum. Every proposed test of his "primitive methane" hypothesis has turned up craps -- he sold the Swedish government on a test of it back in the 1980's, to deep-drill a test hole in ancient, pre-Cambrian crystalline rocks (Sweden has no natural petroleum-generating sediments, so they were ripe pickings for Gold's snake-oil). After expending tens of millions of dollars, with absolutely nothing to show for it but some trace, crustal gases, they finally abandoned the hole. Gold, of course, claimed that the results vindicated his idea. The Swedish government, as stupidly socialist as they are, nevertheless knew bilge when they heard it and sent Tommy-boy packing.
Gold has an even less distinguished record in lunar science -- remember the "deep oceans of dust" that the Lunar Modules were supposed to sink into? That's another brilliant Gold insight.
Yes, he was right about the origin of pulsars -- even a blind pig finds an acorn occasionally.
Tommy Gold -- pernicious fraud. He belongs at Cornell.
From: chevroncars.com
An Average Barrel
(42 U.S. gallons) is refined into:
Another thought....how many dinosaurs does it take to make 1 barrel of oil....now multiply the answer times however many barrels the saudi reserves are.....I doubt that many dinosaurs ever existed.
Before anyone blasts my unscientific method of calculations....i know it is unscientific...
"Before becoming a container for petroleum, the 42 gallon wooden barrel was in use for wine, beer, whiskey and fish."
So, just blame 75% of the confusion on alcohol. ;-)
The part about the double use of the barrels, and the origin of the practice of charring the inside, comes, if I remember right, from the standard American history text of Morrison and Commager.
"...Drilling deep into the crystalline granite of Sweden between 1986 and 1993 revealed substantial amounts of natural gas and oil. 80 barrels of oil were pumped up from a depth between 5.2 km and 6.7 km.
Russian petroleum geologists followed this operation closely. Dr. P.N. Kropotkin reported at a meeting in Moscow that the discovery of oil deep in the Baltic Shield may be considered a decisive factor in the hundred year old debate about the biogenic or abiogenic origin of oil. This discovery was made in deep wells that were drilled in the central part of the crystalline Baltic Shield, on the initiative of T. Gold.
Drilling into crystalline bedrock is now underway in Russia on a large scale. More than 300 wells have been drilled to a depth of more than 5 km and are productive, as also is the giant White Tiger field offshore Vietnam, mostly producing also from basement rock."
From NASA's website on the history of the debate
"...Now let me turn to Gold' s deep dust model. If one actually reads what Gold said in his paper (Gold, 1955, Mon. Not. Roy. Astr. Soc., 115, 585), rather than what some NASA geologists say he said, one finds that it is a carefully reasoned, logical model that was fully consistent with the observations known at that time. Gold argued that (1) the Moon had always been a cold body, (2) the craters were of impact origin, (3) the maria were deposits of material eroded from the surrounding highlands and carried into depressions by an electrostatic transport process, and (4) there was a darkening process operating on the lunar surface that lowered the albedo of material exposed at the surface This model was considered to be a less likely but, nevertheless, credible possibility by most persons outside the NASA Astrogeology group, including Harold Urey, a Nobel Prize winning scientist and the father of modern planetary and meteorite chemistry.
...The notion that the maria deposits were so unconsolidated that a spacecraft would sink out of sight in them was not a part of the original model, nor was it essential to it...
...At the time we published the paper, we considered it to be a significant breakthrough because it showed that the Moon had a fine powdery surface. Of course, after the Apollo landings everyone said that they knew all along that the lunar surface was covered with a fine-grained regolith (e.g., Wilhelms, To a Rocky Moon). However, actual accounts from that period tell a rather different story. Gene Shoemaker was quoted in an article in National Geographic (circa 1963) as saying that the surface was covered with cobbles (fist-sized chunks of rock). I still have a copy of the cover of the Houston telephone directory (circa 1964), which was a NASA publicity photo showing a spacesuited astronaut walking on the NASA geologists' best guess of the Lunar surface: volcanic ash consisting of centimeter-sized rocks. Following the Soviet Luna 9 landings, Gerard Kuiper, the preeminent planetary astronomer of his time, held a news conference in which he proclaimed that the surface was obviously volcanic aa lava, adding that this would "tear an astronaut's boots to shreds". Even after the unmanned Surveyor landings on the moon, the NASA geologists continued to insist that the regolith was course-grained.
...Finally, it should be emphasized that many aspects of Gold's model are correct, after all. The craters are of impact origin. While the maria did turn out to be lava flows, the flow surfaces are buried under several meters of dust. There are, indeed, erosional and depositional processes operating on the lunar surface, including electrostatic levitation, although these processes are not as efficient as Gold hypothesized. And there is ample evidence for his predicted darkening process, which today is called "space weathering". I think it is time for the devil to be given his due."
It is actually unclear how long it takes to generate oil from a carbon source. Of interest to a great many are some recent anomalous finds in the State of Nevada. While most people don't consider Nevada to be an oil producer, the most prolific well in CONUS is one discovered in eastern Nevada in the early '80s, producing 20 million barrels so far.
What is interesting about some of the Great Basin region petroleum finds is that some of them are found in locations that are completely inexplicable, and most have been found by people drilling for other things. What makes them interesting is the extremely young age of some of the petroleum formations, which are young enough that they basically shouldn't exist. The theory du jour is that extremely active geothermal systems in conjunction with a rich geochemistry are somehow manufacturing oil naturally at an unprecedented rate. In any case, it is interesting and there are a lot of good mysteries surrounding the nature of petroleum fields. Nobody really knows how fast petroleum is produced or how much there is.
No one prior to Apollo predicted a bare lava surface on the Moon -- this was well known from the diffuse reflection of the sunlight off the Moon, which indicated a ground-up, powdery surface. The dynamics of soil formation by grinding up the surface rocks was accurately modeled and predicted by Gene Shoemaker (for whom the NEAR mission was named), in contra distinction to Gold's model.
Gold will not admit that he was wrong about the Moon and still believes the same silly story he believed before we went to the Moon with the Apollo missions. Other scientists who were wrong, like Harold Urey, admitted this fact after Apollo, to their everlasting credit. Gold, like the crank he is, refuses to admit error.
It actually is a moot point, but not for the reason some people think. If the entire world ran out of oil today, we still have enough coal right here in this country to manufacture enough oil to last us about 300 years.
What led you to think the liquids holding open these pores might be hydrocarbons left over from the Earth's creation?
Probably reading Arthur Holmes, who had written so many things that were egocentric expressions of opinion. He was the great father of geology - and still is - but I found his work quite shocking.
Shocking in what way?
Whenever he discussed some facts that were inconvenient, he would say that they should not be taken seriously, that it was purely due to chance. He far exceeded his information with the opinions that were mixed in - statements like, "Oil is not found in association with coal except accidentally, and not found in volcanic areas except accidentally." Look at the arc of Indonesia, from Burma to New Guinea: It's far more earthquakey than any other place we know. It makes lots of small, deep earthquakes, it's along exactly that belt that you have volcanoes - and you have petroleum along the whole of the line. "Never found in association with volcanoes except accidentally" - that's a hell of an accident.
So I spent years having these problems with geological texts. And then in the 1970s I had some discussions with King Hubbert, the leading American petroleum geologist, whose word counted as God's. I remember having lunch with him in Washington and saying, "Well, how can you account for the fact that we have oil-producing regions that are so large, that can go from Turkey to Iran to the Persian Gulf and under the plains of Saudi Arabia and on into the mountains of Oman, and the whole of that stretch is oil?"
Why would that be unlikely, given the traditional view of oil forming from organic matter in buried sediments?
Because the oil is all the same, while the sediments in that region are completely different: different ages, different materials. There's no sedimentary material that is uniform throughout the region, that has any coherence. And this just never struck him. His response was, "In geology we don't try and explain things - we just report what we see."
Hubbert's views changed the wealth of nations. The belief that oil would run out, and that those with a source could always increase the price, caused the early-'70s oil crisis. That, to my mind, is a completely stupid attitude that shifted many billions of dollars away from some countries and toward others.
You clearly already had some sort of alternative model in mind.
I knew something that, to this day, the petroleum geologists in this country don't seem to know - that astronomical observations had detected large amounts of hydrocarbons on various planetary bodies in our solar system. We didn't have the very good results that we now have from Titan showing seven different hydrocarbons. But I knew that there were perfectly sound astronomical observations showing hydrocarbons to be common on planetary bodies. So it seemed natural that there should be similar hydrocarbons within the Earth, slowly seeping out.
We don't see a lot of hydrocarbons just lying around on the Earth.
Once the atmosphere has a lot of oxygen, then any hydrocarbon gases that come up are quickly turned into CO2.
Were there precedents for your idea that deep hydrocarbons are a normal fact of planetary geology?
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.
And what was the response?
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, Mende-leyev was the greatest scientist that Russia ever had.
Does it worry you that better international communications mean there's no longer that opportunity for ideas disregarded in one place to find safe havens elsewhere?
Yes. In fact, I wrote somewhere during the Cold War that I sometimes wish the Iron Curtain were much taller than it is, so that you could see whether the development of science with no communication was parallel on the two sides. In this case it certainly wasn't.
I suppose it's understandable that pure scientists might reject a theory just because they don't like it. But why did oil companies interested in the bottom line not pay attention?
Because individual petroleum geologists who work for big companies never wanted to admit that they could have done their planning and their prospecting on an entirely wrong basis.
Perhaps there was little interest in your idea in the 1980s and '90s because oil prices stayed low.
But that made it clear that the geologists' theory and its predictions were wrong.
"What happened, to my great annoyance, was that the other side wanted to ridicule me before the landing by saying, We think it's all hard stuff but Gold thinks you're going to sink out of sight the moment you step onto the surface. It was completely a slander. As I had written, when I step out of a plane in Denver I'm stepping onto a mile of fine granular material - because it all washed out from the mountains - and I don't sink out of sight. I would not have worked on a camera to go to the moon if I had thought it was not going to work. But it was published that Gold says when they step off the ladder they will sink out of sight. And newspapermen, as you probably know, read other newspapers, and these things tend to propagate."
As far as the historical record of what others thought at the time are you saying this isn's true?:
"...actual accounts from that period tell a rather different story. Gene Shoemaker was quoted in an article in National Geographic (circa 1963) as saying that the surface was covered with cobbles (fist-sized chunks of rock). I still have a copy of the cover of the Houston telephone directory (circa 1964), which was a NASA publicity photo showing a spacesuited astronaut walking on the NASA geologists' best guess of the Lunar surface: volcanic ash consisting of centimeter-sized rocks. Following the Soviet Luna 9 landings, Gerard Kuiper, the preeminent planetary astronomer of his time, held a news conference in which he proclaimed that the surface was obviously volcanic aa lava, adding that this would "tear an astronaut's boots to shreds". Even after the unmanned Surveyor landings on the moon, the NASA geologists continued to insist that the regolith was course-grained."
This layer would consist of large quantities of hydrocarbons and would probably be the basis of most of our petroleum sources. [It is likely that methane would not be involved to the extent postulated by Gold.]
As far as the historical record of what others thought at the time are you saying this isn's true?: "...actual accounts from that period tell a rather different story. Gene Shoemaker was quoted in an article in National Geographic (circa 1963) as saying that the surface was covered with cobbles (fist-sized chunks of rock).
There are cobble-sized rocks on the surface. Shoemaker's paper predicts that the grain size of the debris layer is a power-law function; as such, very fine material would predominate. Shoemaker recognized this and indeed, predicted what we would see in the Surveyor pictures before landing -- a rock-strewn surface, with fine material predominating. Hapke has selectively quoted Shoemaker, as he accuses Gold's critics of doing.
I still have a copy of the cover of the Houston telephone directory (circa 1964), which was a NASA publicity photo showing a spacesuited astronaut walking on the NASA geologists' best guess of the Lunar surface: volcanic ash consisting of centimeter-sized rocks.
So now a Houston phone directory is being cited as "proof" that the "geologists" believed this, huh? That speaks for itself.
Following the Soviet Luna 9 landings, Gerard Kuiper, the preeminent planetary astronomer of his time, held a news conference in which he proclaimed that the surface was obviously volcanic aa lava, adding that this would "tear an astronaut's boots to shreds".
Kuiper was an astronomer, not a geologist, and he'd only been to lava flows in the American southwest on selected, supervised field trips. He was wrong -- about a lot of things, but so was Gold, who claimed that the maria weren't (and couldn't possibly be) lava flows.
Even after the unmanned Surveyor landings on the moon, the NASA geologists continued to insist that the regolith was course-grained."
Name one. Anyway, most of the geologists working on Apollo were employed by the U. S. Geological Survey, not NASA. Hapke's statement is a caricature; what does he mean by "coarse-grained" anyway?
My previous statement stands -- if Gold were an honest scientist, he would admit that he was wrong about his pre-Apollo views of the Moon. He has not done so, because he believes that he was right. That's crankdom!
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