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.

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

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.

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.)

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.

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.

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