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.
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.