Friday, December 01, 2006

Is Oil a Fossil Fuel?

The forthcoming issue (Dec. 8) of the scientific journal Nature will contain an article that abundant quantities of methane have been conclusively shown to exist on Titan, one of the moons of Saturn. “We have determined that Titan's methane is not of biologic origin," reports Hasso Niemann of the Goddard Space Flight Center, a principal NASA investigator. Methane, a key hydrocarbon and the principal component of natural gas, actually has been found throughout the solar system. If methane can be produced by an abiotic (or abiogenic) process, so can more complex hydrocarbons. Once you have methane, “the rest is easy,” says Stanford Penner, Ph.D.

Dr. Penner, who is an authority on the Second Law of Thermodynamics, notes that Russian and Ukrainian scientists have produced an elegant proof that abiotic oil production (from intense pressure and high temperatures at least 100 kilometers below the earth's surface) is entirely consistent with the Second Law of Thermodynamics, but that no such proof has ever been put forth for the fossil fuel theory. In fact, he states that there is no “fossil fuel theory,” merely a hypothesis for which no proof has ever been set forth.

Furthermore, oil has been discovered in the earth's Archeozoic rock formations. These are the most ancient of rocks, which were formed before any plants or animals existed on earth. So petroleum here must have had an inorganic origin, rather than being produced from dead dinosaurs and ancient forests, as is commonly believed.

Finally, some older oil wells previously regarded as depleted have been known to be replenished from below. This is certainly evidence that oil is being produced at depths in the earth (where there are no fossil remains) and being pushed upward by intense pressure from below. The best example of this is Green Island in the Gulf of Mexico. When all the oil that could profitably be extracted had been pumped out, the wells there were closed and forgotten about. Then, twenty years later, those wells were found to contain more oil than before any had been removed! If petroleum is constantly produced by an inorganic process, we are never going to run out of oil.

All of which shows that political policies based on the idea that the world is running out of oil are based on a false theory. Just like claims about man-made global warming ruining the earth (see our new chart on global warming). Both ideas depend on “consensus,” a popular belief that prevails because of constant repetition rather than scientific proof.

10 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thanks for posting this! Amazing that I heard that we have known that the fossil fuel hypothesis was BUNK for over a century. And yet, our school system and world teaches this as truth.

You are to be commended for reporting this!

Captain Flint said...

This is hilarious!

Presumably, if you believe in abiogenic oil, you also believe in the tooth fairy and Santa Claus?

Thanks for giving me a good laugh - keep it up!

Edmund Contoski said...

What I offer on my blog is not "beliefs" but logical, rational discourse based on evidence. Elegant scientific proof that oil is abiogenic has been presented in "Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences." No one even pretends to offer scientific proof of the tooth fairy or Santa Claus. Moreover, oil has been found at depths and in locations where there never were any fossils; oil has been found in archeozoic rocks--rocks so ancient they were formed before any type of life existed on earth, not even bacteria. Russians have been extracting oil from these rocks for many years, and U.S. companies are now also drilling in these same type of rocks. Do you think these companies would be spending millions of dollars this way on a "belief" not supported by logic and evidence?

Anonymous said...

I am unable to confirm the item about oil production from Green Island in the Gulf of Mexico.

Anonymous said...

Google: Results 1 - 1 of 1 for "archeozoic rocks" "oil production". (0.10 seconds)

Google: Your search - "archaeozoic rocks" "oil production" - did not match any documents.

Edmund Contoski said...

Google is wonderful, but important information is sometimes unavailable there, as you will see. (There is also a lot of information on Google that you will never find when you look in the wrong places.) The information about Green Island is from an address on Aug. 5, 2006 by Stanford Penner Ph.D., Professor of Engineering Physics at the University of California at San Diego. He has many decades of experience in research in the petroleum industry, is an authority on thermodynamics, and for eight years was chairman of the U.S. Dept. of Energy, Fossil Fuels Research Working Group, a group that included prominent scientists from industry and the academic community as well as government scientists. Though you can find nothing about Green Island on Google, Dr. Penner describes it as a “famous example” of depleted oil wells refilling from below. A DVD of Professor Penner's address is available for $20 from DDP, 1601 N. Tucson Blvd. #9, Tucson AZ 85716.

Also, Professor Thomas Gold, in his book The Deep Hot Biosphere, states, “We have seen oil and gas fields refilling themselves, sometimes as fast as they were being drained, and many fields have already produced several times as much as earlier estimates predicted....In looking at the petroleum industry, one also has to consider the widespread and unexpected locales in which drilling is now taking place....More than 100 deep holes have been drilled in Tartarstan (in Central Russia)....About a hundred wells in other parts of the world exist that were also drilled in basement rock, and many are producing petroleum.” Dr. Gold is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, a Fellow of the Royal Society, and an Emeritus Professor of Physics at Cornell University. He has also taught at Cambridge and Harvard. In addition, he is the author of an article several years ago in the "Procedings of the National Academy of Sciences" on the subject of abiogenic (abiotic) oil, which became the basis for his book.

That article came as a surprise to Americans, but Russian and Ukrainian scientists were miffed because the theory was not new to them and they were given no credit for it. The RU theory that petroleum is abiogenic, not of fossil origin as Western scientists have believed, goes back more than a century. However, extensive work on this was done about a half century ago and was explained in Russian scientific literature—in the Russian language—over the years by a number of Russian and Ukrainian scientists. But while many of these scientists understood English and were reading our scientific literature, few if any American scientists in this field understood Russian.

Most Americans do not know that Russia is one of the world's largest oil exporters. It has had a large oil industry for many years and has been very successful in finding new petroleum deposits. Prof. Penner has contacts in the Russian oil industry, from whom he has learned that the Russians have been finding significant new oil deposits in archeozoic rocks and are producing from them. He also states that Western oil companies are now drilling in archeozoic rocks, too.

Finally, in 2002 an article appeared in the "Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences" which included three Russian petro scientists as co-authors with J. F. Kenny of Houston, Texas. The Russians are Vladimir Kutcherov, Nikolai Bendelliani, and Vladimir Alekseev. They are affiliated with the Russian Academy of Sciences, Joint Institute of Earth Physics; The Russian University of Oil and Gas; and the Russian Academy of Science, Institute for High Pressure Physics. Their article is titled: “The Evolution of Multi-component Systems at High Pressures: VI. The Thermodynamic Stability of the Hydrogen-carbon system: the Genesis of Hydrocarbons and the Origin of Petroleum.”

Anaconda said...

This is a strong synopsis of abiotic oil theory. It is regrettable that oil geologists, for reasons of professional survival and group mentality, are so willful in their determination to ignore the evidence and continue with a hypothesis born in 1757, the dark ages of science.

But the evidence is getting harder to ignore.

Chevron has described their deepwater, deep-drilling oil discovery in the Gulf of Mexico, as five miles below the surface of the sea in their "Human Energy" ad series. Specifically, their Jack 2 well located oil over 20,000 feet deep below the floor of the Gulf in 7,000 feet of water. This find is estimated to have anywhere between 3 and 15 billion barrels. Crude oil has been discovered 180 miles off the coast of Brazil, 16,000 feet below the floor of the Atlantic Ocean, also estimated to have billions of barrels, some even suggesting it may be one of the biggest finds ever. Finally, oil has been located in 9,000 feet of water in the Nigerian Delta off the West African coast.

All this suggests a whole new virgin territory for oil exploration.

Deepwater, deep-drilling is also important because oil geologists claimed there was an "oil window" between 7,500 feet and 15,000 feet deep. Any deeper and oil would not develop or would breakdown into methane because of the heat. This was one of their prime arguments against abiotic oil. Obviously, that was wrong.

An interesting new argument is that crude oil has a diamond fingerprint that can only originate in the deep manel.

More properly called diamondoids, diamonds on a molecular level. Diamonds can only be created under ultra high temperature and pressure, nobody disputes diamonds are only created in the mantel or created in the lab mimicking similar conditions.

Diamondoids have the same properties as diamonds and can only be created in the lab with ultra high pressure and temperature. (Just as pointed out that the hydrocarbon alkane series can be created in the lab with ultra high temperature and pressure.)

All crude oil has at least traces of diamondoids. Thus these microscopic diamonds are the non-biogenic fingerprints that show oil originated in the mantel.

A further interesting note: Since diamondoids share the same properties as their larger brethren, their molecular, geometric structure is very stable, and they are hard. Scientists are looking for nanotechnology applications. Guess who is selling the diamondoids? That's right Chevron, while simple diamondoids were first discovered back in 1933, Chevron, in 2002, discovered that diamondoids were present in greater concentrations and more complex structures in the deep oil they discovered in the Gulf of Mexico.

To read more about deepwater, deep-drilling and abiotic oil, Google Oil is Mastery. Links are provided to scientific papers, news articles, and tradepapers. There are posts, comments are welcome.

Edmund Contoski said...

Thanks for adding supporting information. Your comments on diamondoid signature are especially interesting because of the high pressure required for diamond formation. Professor Penner has stressed the need for extremely high pressures in the formation of petroleum, as explained in the 2002 article I cited in "Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences". Those pressures simply do not exist on or near the surface of the earth. He says the popular hypothesis that petroleum is derived from fossils offers no rationale for how it can be produced without those high pressures, which can be found only at depths in the earth that would rule out fossil origin. The high temperatures required for petroleum formation are also not found at or anywhere near the surface of the earth, but the high pressures required are an even bigger (insurmountable) obstacle to the claim that petroleum deposits are of fossil origin.

Keith Jackson said...

It is not "Green" Island, it is "Eugene" Island.

Anonymous said...

It's all about time....

made my day! :-)
thx