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.
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.
I buy into this abiotic theory. Not because of John or Adam, but for two entirely different reasons.
First, I heard well over a decade ago about abiotic oil from this guy:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Gold#Origins_of_petroleum
It’s an amazing read.
Second. Where do Diamonds come from? Dinosaurs??
Of course not. They come from deep deposits of nearly pure carbon. Mix carbon with hydrogen under significant pressure and temperature and you get hydrocarbons.
Duh.
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!
Whether we’ve reached “peak” oil or not, that is not the problem.
There could be a 40 year supply. Or a 4,000 year supply.
The real problem is that the rate of consumption is now the same as the rate of production. And the increase in the rate of consumption is greater than the increase in the rate of consumption.
This can only lead to higher prices, as well as shortages. Even if we (the West) reduce our consumption (or at least reduce the amount we’re increasing it) countries like China and India will make up for the demand.
In short, we’re screwed.
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.
Personally I can only see a scarcity of oil as a good thing. Whether it runs out or not is not what we should be concerned with but rather what it is doing to our environment. We aren’t capable of regulating ourselves enough to prevent the massive pollution that we’ve been seeing. I’ll even admit that air quality has improved with efforts of the last few decades in some places but between the crap in the atmosphere and the what we keep spilling into the oceans, it’s just not going to go well for us in the long term. 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. But hey, what do I know? I don’t run the world.
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).
wikipedia’s article is pretty well sourced. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiotic_oil I am no expert but it seems unlikely that it is true.
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.
How much oil is in the ground doesn’t worry me. How much carbon is in the air worries me. Our power needs to be nuclear and our transportation needs to be electrical.
Does this have to be a binary thing? Couldn’t oil have been produced in multiple ways.
I just read the Wikipedia article. wow! The Earth is an amazing place!
It just seems to me that that is a huge amount of biomass to account for all that oil.
The Earth must have been like a tropical jungle for eons.
Or, some rock chemistry took place also!
Amazing nevertheless.
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.”
It’s PEOPLE! Soylent green is PEOPLE~~~!
Ewwww. Carbon is BAD…
Ewwww. Oil is BAD…
Ewwww. Carbon dioxide is BAD…
Ewwww. Hydrocarbons is BAD….
You people make me sick.
The oil fields on the continents are nearly all located in sediments laid down by rivers even if that occurred many millions of years ago. When they drill looking for oil they are constantly checking for the right micro fossils or were.
There are now ways to send waves through the rocks and get a pretty clear image of what is there.
The oil fields in the gulf are in sedimentary rock.
The studies I read suggest that non commercial amounts of abiotic natural gas may in fact be found at some locations.
It clearly is not the source of the staggering amounts of methice found at many location or the gas in coal mines, shale rock, oil fields, etc.
Calcium carbonate=limestone/marble=sedimentary rock normally made of the remains of corals, shells, etc.
Seriously? You’re asking us internet people? We don’t know shit, man! None of us know WTF we’re talking about.
I love when I hear in American news almost daily how the US needs less foreign oil. And the comment that oil comes from areas that are hostile to the US …… we aren’t hostile here in Calgary towards those to the south of us, just amused by your ignorance to the rest of the world.
Stop buying our oil, the Chinese are holding out their hands, waving money in our faces.
#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.
As we all know from our Italian Dressing on our salads, oil and water don’t mix.
That being said. Jed Clampett did OK with it.
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.
#3
Thomas Gold went to the alps, where there were no sedimentary layers containing dinosaurs, and found oil. Not much but it was there.
The basic idea is that methane does come from the earth. Methane is a hydrocarbon, and someplace down there a microorganism feeds on the methane, like ones near deep undersea vents, and poops out oil.
We don’t come in contact with these things because they live in a very high temperature and pressure environment.
Oil from dinosaurs is the biggest conventional wisdom fail since religion.
#5 Wrong.
If we got the microorganisms that make the oil it would still be uneconomic because of the energy required to make a high temp/pressure environment for them to operate in.
That is NOT the issue though. Oil exploration has been premised on a biological origin. If oil comes from another process oil deposits are going to be arrayed in an entirely different way.
The breakdown is that there is much, much more oil than is generally believed.
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.
Huh. Is anyone else getting a whole heap of spam links at the bottom of this page?
Perhaps if we heat and compress them, they’ll turn into some kind of self sustaining internet fuel.
http://tinyurl.com/spammy-oily-stuff
#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.
Molecular markers show that the vast majority of oil is biogenic. There may be limited amounts produced abiogenically, but test wells that should have found it come up dry or with only trace amounts which test as biogenic. If you go hunting for oil using the assumption that it’s old carboniferous forests, you find oil. If you go hunting in areas that didn’t have old forests, you don’t (or you find very very limited amounts).
It’s not an either/or, as these people seem to claim. The theory is not insane, but simply cannot account for amount of oil we’ve found in areas where we would expect it if it were biogenic.
Here is a podcast that gets into this very thing…along with some other ineresting topics. But unlike AC and JCD, they look into the actual evidence, and don’t just riff on the headline until they can pattern-find it into a conspiracy.
http://therealitycheck.libsyn.com/trc_94_abiogenic_oil_homosexuality_and_evolution_koala_bears
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.
#23 is right.
Hydrocarbons, which include gas, oil, and coal, come from layers of rock containing long dead animals and plants. Some of it is in the forms of oil shale, which contains oil, but that oil is only extracted by using a lot of energy to do the extraction. Same for tar sands or coal liquefaction.
Is it possible that other, easier to extract sources of hydrocarbons will be found? Yes, but chances are the new sources will be hard to extract also. If cheap oil is found, we’ll hear about it.
The last new sources of oil in the US and Canada I heard of (I lived in Minnesota at the time) were in western North Dakota and presumably nearby Saskatchewan and Manitoba. I don’t know how easy/hard this stuff is to extract, as I worked as a chemical engineer a long time ago and am out of the loop on oil extraction.
“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.
Triple Point For Hydrocarbons?
50,000 atmospheres, a temperature of approximately 1500°C
Ouch!