Uncle Dave Wants 2 Know: Abiotic (Non-fossil Generated) Oil — Is It For Real?

It has always seemed strange to me that dead carbon-based lifeforms are required to produce a material found deep within the earth when the molecules within the plants and animals themselves came from the soil. But a living organism is the simplest mechanism for these hydrocarbons to form naturally, so be it.

Still, whether oil is a fossil fuel or not, there is not enough at depths we can reach to replenish what we are using, at the rate we are using. It would probably be worth funding research projects that would enable digging beyond the depths the Russians have to find the feasibility of getting oil at those depths, as well as trying to understand how much there might be below those depths. Until we have solid evidence of the contrary, we should plan for the worst assume it will be running out, or at least get to a prohibitively expensive price point within this decade.

Crap.

Nobody’s ever proved it and extracted oil has so many biotic components that oil companies hire botanists to help to analyze it.

The original science, as pointed out above, was produced under Stalin. There’s an era that everyone associates with impartial scientific inquiry!

Don’t really care how it’s made.

The point is that it’s a dirty fuel, non-renewable for all practical purposes and today found in places that are hostile to Americans.

Enough already in coming up with with hairball reasons to use more of. The future is in alternative clean energy found right here in America.

Abiotic oil was an idea that received a lot of attention in early 2000s when Westerners started hearing of Thomas Gold’s ideas which he got from Russia.

It is my understanding that the idea of abiotic oil has been scientifically shot down and disproved in the last few years (but I can’t recall exactly what the weakness was).

The oil wells in the US seem to have been sucked dry. Will they repopulate under this abiotic theory? It still seems to be a problem that we are using up the easy-access stuff (can we call it “low hanging fruit” if it is abiotic?) and must resort to expensive (in more ways than one) extraction methods. I don’t know what is right but abiotic/biotic arguments seem a bit moot. Oil is amazing stuff but it doesn’t seem to be a long term (how long is long) solution.

Does this have to be a binary thing? Couldn’t oil have been produced in multiple ways.

What Chuck Said. If it takes 200 million years to refill our “oil aquifers” it doesn’t matter how it’s made, it just matters that we are consuming faster than it is replenished. Or we drill deeper wells.

Go nuke with Thorium and breeder reactors for grid power and natural gas for vehicular transport. Tides us over for 30-50 years while we find the “next big thing.”

Ewwww. Carbon is BAD…
Ewwww. Oil is BAD…
Ewwww. Carbon dioxide is BAD…
Ewwww. Hydrocarbons is BAD….

You people make me sick.

Seriously? You’re asking us internet people? We don’t know shit, man! None of us know WTF we’re talking about.

#17. Har!!! Gotta go with TooManyPuppies on this one. Too many opinions…all stink.

I would like to know how all them critters got that deep into the earth though.

I always hope for “an expert” to stumble upon this blog while searching for some arcane related point and bored enough to drop a few lines. It does happen, just not enough.

Its not possible this type of issue doesn’t get discussed on some high tech blog/system? Are those not included in the WWW? Beneath their contempt are we?

The LOGIC that Ah Yea presents #2 sways me but I come to rest on the general consensus. Ever notice that funny things happen at the extremes. Both High and Low Heat, Both High and Low Temps and reality changes.

And to that the notion of time, LONG TIME, and reality changes again. Saw an article last week that a high temp/pressure container can produce electricity as the material gets compressed. Input/Output not detailed. High Temp/High Prssure transmutes many materials. Even now we can use relatively low temp/heat to destroy/crack/dissemble toxic waste.

Yes, maybe some basic science stimulus/jobs bucks could be spent on High Temp/Pressure Machines and see what they could do for us.

I have a client that’s in the oil drilling business and we had a serous convo about it. He says it’s all BS. Also, if it were real, it would be too big of a secret to hide.

#23

There is no conspiracy. Everyone has a boss. If you follow the playbook and fail you keep your job, generally. If you put the company’s money in a play against the consensus and fail you are done.

When the credit crisis hit the people who made out like bandits were those who were too odd or rich to give a damn about what everybody else thought.

In this case a spectacular discovery in a non-consensus spot has a much smaller payoff. Once the concept is proven bigger players will move in and reap the rewards anyway.

I’m in the business of finding oil.

Bottom line is we’d be drilling in different places if oil was produced in any quantity through processes other than the ones we know about.

Not saying that it can’t be produced abiogenically or that microorganisms can’t produce some too, but not in anything like the quantities we need. Not even quantities that make it worth drilling for. The Russians tried, the Scandinavians tried, the Canadians tried, (and they are in just exactly the regions that should produce it)….they got a few dozen barrels. Better seismic imaging is not showing it either.

So it’s not crackpot to have looked for it, but we have and it’s not there.

“Uncle Dave Wants 2 Know: Abiotic (Non-fossil Generated) Oil — Is It For Real?”

NO IT IS NOT!!!

Yes oil is created in an natural process, it is not a magical creation of God (sorry Fundies).

But, the amount of new oil created in a ground in a year is the amount of oil we use up in about an hour. If we can reduce our oil useage by about 99.99%, we can call oil a “renewable” resource. Ain’t going to happen.

Also, Mark Curry’s constant reliance on abiotic oil as proof against “peak oil” doesn’t make him a “crackpot”, it makes him sound like a complete idiot. (as are all the posts above saying it is for real)

Peak Oil is for real, and we have already passed the peak. Figure out how to deal with it fast instead of wishing for magical fantasies like abiotic oil to fix it for us.

#28. ArianeB. Thank you.

Uncle Dave: as a rational man with an open mind, I think many reading this thread would be interested in any initial/final/developing thoughts you may have as this thread becomes a day old or so and lost to active consideration?

Whats interesting is how many “general concepts” are demonstrated already in the discussion.

Not too different than so many other subjects other than idiot bloggers with an axe to grind.

# 19 McCullough said, “I would like to know how all them critters got that deep into the earth though.”

And there must have been a constant parade of dinosaurs swimming out a few miles before drowning and sinking to the bottom of the sea.

Coal and petroleum are a lot alike and fossils of dearly departed plants and animals have been found in coal. Thus coal and petroleum must have been created by dead biomass. Bad logic whether true or not.

I have read three or four believable scenarios about the creation of abiotic oil. I have yet to read a believable theory about the mechanics of biological oil production. How did all those plants and animals collect in just the right place to get subsumed by the earth and pressured into oil? And, since it would take centuries to collect sufficient biomass, why didn’t it decay first?

I tend to believe the abiotic theories MAY be true. After all, we applied great heat to my Aunt Trudy when she died and, instead of a puddle of oil, we only got some ashes.

Oil is not scarce, there is no real shortage of oil. There is however a shortage of cheap easily accessible oil which will continue to get worse. Acceptable alternative energy source. Look down, if you can see past your belly those things down there are called feet start walking. I used to walk five miles to school, uphill both ways, in the snow. Gee I’m getting old.

There is some speculation that oil is abiotic in origin — generally asserting that oil is formed from magma instead of an organic origin. These ideas are really groundless. All unrefined oil carries microscopic evidence of the organisms from which it was formed. These organisms can be traced through the fossil record to specific time periods when quantities of oil were formed.

Likewise, there are two primal energy forces operating on this planet, and all forms of energy descend from one of these two. The first is the internal form of energy heating the Earth’s interior. This primal energy comes from radioactive decay and from the heat energy originally generated during accretion of the planet some 4.6 billion years ago. There are no known mechanisms for transferring this internal energy into any secondary energy source. And the chemistry of magma does not compare to the chemistry of hydrocarbons. Magma is lacking in carbon compounds, and hydrocarbons are lacking in silicates. If hydrocarbons were generated from magma, then you would expect to see some closer kinship in their chemistry.

#34 Animby said, “since it would take centuries to collect sufficient biomass, why didn’t it decay first?”
During the Carboniferous period plants first evolved lignin in their bark. Unlike today there were few insects, animals or even bacteria that could effectively digest this new material. Lower sea levels meant extensive swamps and low lying forests. All this lasted for nearly 60 million years.
Maybe some oil is still being produced, but the bulk comes from the carboniferous (long before the Dinosaurs appeared).

You’re asking if abiotic oil is real? No, it isn’t.

(This has been another edition of simple answers to simple questions.)

Speaking of questions…

Why do you folks dumb down the blog with this kind of crap? Are you just fishing for page hits? Does the disservice you do in posting this stuff not bother you at all?

present physical mass is inherent. future mass from the sun is gonna be free

#45: Very little additional mass gets added to the Earth over the ages, and most of that comes from meteorites and an occasional comet. Almost nothing comes from the Sun.

To rephrase a line from a famous movie, “These aren’t the oil sources you’re looking for, move along.”

Maybe, so where is this deep drill pipe and what does its chemical analysis say?

This idea could be just as hopeful as the green revolution is. Lets put some research funds into it. Say like those dollars the idiots stopped placing on magnetic confined fusion, which those idiots took off the energy policy.

What a 25 per cent depletion rate for the mex gulf holes! The saudi coverup of Garwar field depletion and their screwing it with pumping.

Its the end times for fossil fuels, get thinking about mammoth nuke generators with onsite fuel processing. They could make car fuel (hydrogen somehow contained) at a profitable 5 cents an equivalent gas gallon.

Those giant wind turbines costs have been lied about. They have availabilites of 5 to 10 percent (due to high wind speed start ups). Go try to ask for availability info from their owners.

“The suggestion that petroleum might have arisen from some transformation of squashed fish or biological detritus is surely the silliest notion to have been entertained by substantial numbers of persons over an extended period of time.” — Fred Hoyle, 1982

# 6 greyangel:
“We KNOW there are cleaner sources of energy. Hydroelectric and solar is real. The only thing we seem to lack is a way to store that energy that doesn’t require strip mining for rare minerals and all the disposal issues involved with throw away batteries.”

The best idea I have seen for large scale energy storage is simply to pump water uphill. Take a nice mountain or other declivity and build two reservoirs separated by an appropriate height. While sunlight is abundant, use solar power to pump from the lower to the higher, then at night reverse the flow and run it through a hydroelectric plant. Admittedly this is problematic on the plains.

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# 35 Animby:
“I have read three or four believable scenarios about the creation of abiotic oil. I have yet to read a believable theory about the mechanics of biological oil production. How did all those plants and animals collect in just the right place to get subsumed by the earth and pressured into oil? And, since it would take centuries to collect sufficient biomass, why didn’t it decay first?”

Let’s see. It did not involve swimming dinosaurs, as a previous poster scoffed. It involved seas, warm and not so warm, but warm enough for there to be lots of plankton, krill, algae, etc. in the layers that are lit by the sun. The Earth has always had a lot of these. Over time, these organisms die and their corpses slowly fall to the sea bed, where it’s usually deep enough that there is no light and little oxygen and only sparse life. Over millions of years, this stuff piles up and gets deep, and eventually gets buried under sediment, which cuts the available oxygen to approximately zip, then more sediment and then — more sediment! The pressure on these piles of corpses builds as the sediment builds up and eventually the temperature rises. (If you are skeptical of this process, just look up sedimentary rock and consider how much of that there is in the world. Answer — a lot!) Once the temperature reaches about 175 to 325 degrees F (80-180 C), the organic matter undergoes pyrolysis, cooking the hydrocarbons out of the once-living matter. Higher temps can crack the molecules even further, producing gas. Once enough liquid forms, it can migrate through the rocks and occasionally it comes up against an impermeable layer and forms a pool under it — an oil field is created! The inorganic rock left behind goes through its own transformations, becoming sandstone, limestone, marble, etc.

Even if you argue that such a process could take millions of years, well if it took ten million, that means it could have happened more than three hundred times since life appeared on the Earth.

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# 50 Al Gore Has My Hamster:
“The point that is never addressed is that any acceptable new energy source must be American standard of living neutral.”

Sorry. Ain’t gonna happen, unless that big fusion breakthrough happens in the next five years. (The fusion establishment has been saying “Fusion us just 25 years away!” for the last sixty years.)

I’m a layman. How would I know if oil was abiotic? Let’s say it is- if we never run out of it, won’t we instead run out of whatever compounds give rise to it?

http://www.rense.com/general75/zoil.htm

…the true soure of oil lies under the granite..we just havent drilled (here in USA) to prove it yet…but we will…