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.
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.
Clearly this is the work of the VRWC trying to confuse the Enviro-Nazi's.
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.
They never stopped ;)
I WANT to believe him (I really, really want this theory to be true), but I also want more evidence first.
"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."
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?
PKB, naturally.
Thanks for asking.
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.
"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?)
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.
God-like would seem more appropriate:)
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.
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