Welcome to a new, occasional post where I will posit a question that’s bugging me either because I can’t find enough info on it, don’t know if I can trust what I’ve read, or am just too damn lazy to research myself, allowing you, my readers, to do the work for me. So, let’s get to the first question.
Several times on No Agenda I’ve heard Adam and John mention abiotic oil in passing. Having never heard of it before, I decided to look it up and found this rather wordy article from a couple of years ago. If true, it means the price of oil is far more inflated than we are led to believe because it is anything but a scarce resource. In fact, we will effectively never run out. I’ve always wondered how there could have been that many dinosaurs and plants to create that much oil that has been found, despite the time involved.
Is this theory real or crap? A scam or a diversion? What do you think?
Stalin’s team of scientists and engineers found that oil is not a ‘fossil fuel’ but is a natural product of planet earth – the high-temperature, high-pressure continuous reaction between calcium carbonate and iron oxide – two of the most abundant compounds making up the earth’s crust. This continuous reaction occurs at a depth of approximately 100 km at a pressure of approximately 50,000 atmospheres (5 GPa) and a temperature of approximately 1500°C, and will continue more or less until the ‘death’ of planet earth in millions of years’ time. The high pressure, as well as centrifugal acceleration from the earth’s rotation, causes oil to continuously seep up along fissures in the earth’s crust into subterranean caverns, which we call oil fields. Oil is still being produced in great abundance, and is a sustainable resource – by the same definition that makes geothermal energy a sustainable resource. All we have to do is develop better geotechnical science to predict where it is and learn how to drill down deep enough to get to it. So far, the Russians have drilled to more than 13 km and found oil. In contrast, the deepest any Western oil company has drilled is around 4.5 km.
A team consisting of Russian scientists and Dr J. F. Kenney, of Gas Resources Corporation, Houston, USA, have actually built a reactor vessel and proven that oil is produced from calcium carbonate and iron oxide, as detailed on the Gas Resources website.
#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.
In a word, no. Chemical analysis of oil indicates its how it was created through different plant and animal mass. If you want a good discussion regarding oil.
# 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.
Darned good question.
Abiotic METHANE is clearly here (and on other planets/moons)
And who’s to say what reactions can take place with all the temperature/pressure/metals variation down below.
But that said, I suspect most petroleum discovered so far is algae swamps of old.
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.
Crap.
This idea originated with Thomas Gold in the 1950’s. He argued that earthquakes, large meteor strikes, and the like would cause deep abiologic oil to migrate nearer to the surface by creating a network of cracks. So far, so good, but science should be testable. He drilled in a large meteor crater in Sweden and didn’t find much other than the petroleum based drilling lubricant he pumped down there himself.
Oil didn’t come from dinosaurs and plants. Most of it came from algae, of which the Earth has always had a gracious plenty.
Plants became coal and dinosaurs became fossils.
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.
# 36 clancys_daddy said, “I used to walk five miles to school, uphill both ways, in the snow.”
Oh, we used to dream of peacefully walking to school in the snow. We had to climb the vertical ice face of a super glacier while fighting off pterodactyls the whole way…
#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).
Just a few points.
aslightlycrankygeek – The material for plants doesn’t come from the soil, it comes from the air. Plants grow using photosynthesis to process CO2 into Carbon and Oxygen. Don’t feel bad, they asked 100 Oxford University students 8 years ago the same question and around 80% got it WRONG.
mentor972 – How can it be a secret when some business operate under the premise of Abiotic oil. As for “secret” if you look into the origins of oil, the dead Dinosaur explanation is only the leading theory… and lets face it, theories can be wrong.
Lets take time for example. EVERYBODY believed that Newton’s understanding of universal time was correct. Then along came Einstein and blew that theory out of the water with relativity and the worlds most simple thought experiment.
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?
The leading theory for the generation of oil isn’t from Dinosaurs or plants. “Most” scientists believe it is from tiny creatures such as diatoms, foraminifera, and radiolaria.
Diatoms are quite interesting in that they are silica (hydrated silicon dioxide) based algae, about the size of a pinhead and produce their own oil in order to store the energy produced from photosynthesis and increase their buoyancy.
They live in water, both fresh and sea.
Anyway, they die, get eaten etc and sink to the bottom and layers build up over time that get covered over etc. etc you know the rest.
present physical mass is inherent. future mass from the sun is gonna be free
our stupidity.. priceless
#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.”
Discussed a couple of years ago: http://tinyurl.com/6poqwz
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 point that is never addressed is that any acceptable new energy source must be American standard of living neutral. Smart cars, mass transit and urban living don’t cut it. If you’re less evolved and OK with that horror, go for it.
“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
#51, let’s play “Spot the logical fallacy.”
Answer: https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Argument_from_authority
No geologist thinks that oil derives from dinosaurs…and also the rocks where oil is found are usually not the rocks where it formed. Oil is a fluid and migrates through permeable rocks (or to the surface, to cite an example in the news) Source rock formations associated with oil deposits are always marine rock, usually basins in areas of high plankton productivity. Gazillions of dead microorganisms over many thousands of years drift down to the bottom of the basin, where decay is very slow or absent due to low oxygen content, and end up incorporated in the sediments, and eventually end up turning into oil. (Algae seems to produce gas fields, though)
Oil does tend to migrate upwards and can be trapped in sandstones laid down by rivers—doesn’t mean it forms from fossils in river beds.
The comment about how many dinosaurs are required also show a lack of appreciation for the scale of geologic time: it’s BIG. The Karoo basin in Africa is estimated to contain trillions of skeletal fossils of mammal-like reptiles from the Permian era, before the time of the dinosaurs. (no oil in these terrestial sedisments)
Hydrocarbons from organic sources have a certain “handedness” that inorganic hydrocarbons lack…and guess what petroleum has.
# 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 remember reading some thirty years or more ago a scientific paper which pointed out that the Vietnamese (I believe, could be wrong) were drilling really deep holes way below the level at which anything living could have ever been. No fossil activity ever in the history of the earth. This means that anything extracted could only have a chemical base, or origin and was most certainly unconnected in any way with anything which had ever had life. What they pumped up was oil! I have a vague memory that some Scandinavian scientists as well as American scientists were involved in this. They most certainly wrote a long paper – most impressive and provided what seemed to me to be irrefutable evidence.
Sorry to be so vague about this, so anecdotal, but anyone interested should be able to uncover what I’m talking about. I should start with old editions of Scientific American (Oh God, how I miss what that used to be before it became total rubbish just talking to the select few). I’m old, therefore not up on all this but it does seem to me to be far too readily accepted what oil is supposed to be. I am a falsificationist, therefore highly suspicious of the readily accepted, the appeal to ‘authority’, the ‘final’ answer.
Science is a continuously evolving subject, progressing by revealing that present knowledge is flawed, faulty and even in some cases Fawlty.
Still. It does provide a damned good living for the likes of Gore doesn’t it? Another clay footed ‘expert’
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?
I’m not a chemist. Nor do I portray one on Tv (har!). I’d truly like to believe in this alternative origin of oil. But there is one snag I can’t get around. Crude oil is a hydrocarbon. Calcium Carbonate (CaCO3) and Iron Oxide (Fe2O3), doesn’t have any Hydrogen in it. So if this theory was right about these two compounds being all that’s needed to make oil. Where does the Hydrogen come from? I should think an abundance of it, would be required. Not merely a trace element of something nearby, in the earth. And unless I’m mistaken, there are other elements in crude oil. Like Sulfur. Hydrocarbon compounds are pretty complex. Crude oil is “cracked” down into many lighter hydrocarbons, like gasoline and various solvents. So it stands to reason that crude oil is far more complex than anything that made from it, combined. And something as simple as calcium carbonate and rusty iron, isn’t very likely the source. Not unless the heat and pressure of the earth’s crust can magically split atoms, and make new elements.
I’m not saying that crude oil must be made from fossilized plants and animals. Just that it has to be something a bit more complex than what this report claims.
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…
…if oil/gas is fossilized fuel…why is there methane on other planets?…
I’m no scientist either. Yet I find it notable that Deepwater Horizon was the deepest hole drilled for oil – the record breaker at a depth greater than the bottom of the Marianas Trench – and they found oil past believing at insane pressures.
If I have concerns, they are more along the lines of radioactivity levels in the petroleum and associated hazards. Crude is already a toxic nightmare : the dispersant exercise in the Gulf of Mexico ups toxicity by something like 5 times. Spraying that around seems sure to cause kill lasting more than the usual 2 decades. Meanwhile the government is foisting sea products as acceptable food supply.
They do love their radioactivity. It’s a wonder U.S. soldiers don’t glow in the dark from DU munitions.
I live in the area of the oilpatch and have been through Fort McMurray and Fort MacKay ( and I’m not going to improve on my hours-long introduction to that reproduction of Dante’s Inferno in a hurry. Scuttlebutt is that Beaufort Sea and Dakotas reserves beyond need for centuries have been unreported to the public.
Now if you were a speculator….that’s the sort of market control game you’d play…if you could. Besides…it’s a strategic war materiel : easy to game politically as has been done for decades.