Oil

I don't know where to put this thread (If not the right section please move)

I came across a very interesting site. If you want to explore the idea of oil not being as limited as the mainstream seem to think i would share/recommend "The Deep Hot Biosphere" by Gold.

In his book asserted that oil is abiotic, oil is not biology reworked by geology, it is geology reworked by biology. It's not a well known phenomena but oil wells refill from deeper down, some quite fast others less so. Also Gold predicted that oil would be found in places current methods to do not even consider a possibility.

If Gold is correct we will find oil on Mars as well. Sadly the idea of oil has been hijacked by people who need for it to be far more limited than a small minority think it is. And maybe to some extent rightly so but hiding the truth bothers me, the truth rule for me and if oil is indeed seeping up from much lower down then it should be told and let the chips fall where they may. If true this would not help us much unless we start looking for oil in places we normally would not expect to find it.

If not true then we are indeed approaching the end of oil and quite possibly our life styles at least if not our civilization unless we figure out a way to generate energy in a comparable fashion, which I think we will but it will not be a smooth transition. The point of this is that science can be wrong, it usually quickly self corrects and the bad science is kicked out but science is run by humans so they do sometimes hang onto ideas that make more sense personally than they do scientifically.

The idea of abiotic oil is an idea that has been around in the west for along time but the first theories on oil was that is was abiotic, in Eastern block science abiotic oil was mainstream. Politics can still be a big part of science, not because science is dictated by politics but because politics often dictates where the money for research comes from. Theories that are against capitalism or the status quo of any political system are not always pursued with equal vigor.

The main reason i think abiotic oil hasn't been given it's day in court is due to the environmental impact of oil use. From getting out of the ground to using it as fuel oil is nothing but problems from air pollution to toxic waste oil is not a good thing to just fiddle about with. The general consensus is that the faster we get off the "oil standard" the better the world will be and I agree for the most part. Oil should be nothing but industrial feed stock not a source of energy.

The mainstream environmental movement thinks that research into abiotic oil will be hijacked to justify cut backs in funding for research into alternate energy. There are people from the other side of the track politically that have tried to hijack the idea of abiotic oil for their own political means so while science is really suffering from both schools of political thought it's the truth that gets shoved aside in the political battle.

We all know that world economy is dependent on oil. Unlimited supply will ruin it and the minority who benefit from it. so they will try to control the supply.

Our civilization needs energy to survive unless we change our lifestyle then we are dependent on the existing energy sources.

I am also getting news that oil companies are also going to the extent of lobbying against laws that encourage greener fuel.

Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated.

 

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It almost doesn't matter where you think oil comes from, the estimates of reserves remain the same, and wells become depleted at the same rates. The deposits as we found them filled up over millions of years irrespective of the source, so they aren't going to fill up again any time soon.

We are indeed approaching the end of the age of cheap oil. The search for new sources has been going on for some time, and nothing significant has been found lately.

 

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Oil wells do indeed refill - but current theory has them refilling from other (perhaps sparse) oil bearing strata. Any well has a productive period then a period of declining production; if you shut them down at that point they do indeed refill as the remaining oil drains towards the drilling site. That alone is not evidence of abiotic oil production.

In any case, abiotic oil production, if it runs at a similar speed as fossil oil production, has the same problems - millions of years to produce useful quantities. Since we don't have oil volcanoes it seems unlikely that there are more rapid processes occurring.

 

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There was some theory at the time of earth formation there was a large amount of methane and ethane and the become taped in the crust of the earth.

 

I think it's likely that some oil comes from abiotic sources, but not the majority of it.

 

I am getting old, didn't I have a debate on this abiotic oil shit already??? Anyhow, let's educate...

It matters NOT if oil is abiotic. What matters is the refill rate. If your abiotic refill rate is still very low (we use it way faster than it is sipping up) then you will still run out of it....

Try to get this simple fact into your head, then you can dream about oil on Mars and other irrelevant myth...

 

Most of the support for abiotic oil came from the old USSR - Ideologically it was unacceptable that oil be finite - Man would always be greedy seeking the limited supply, never converted into the new Soviet man - "From each according to his abilities and to each according to his needs." Etc. Back in that era, scientist followed the party line. In the area of agriculture genetics was also in conflict with the ideology that man (and plants) were perfectible by external controls alone. Many Russians starved as a result of that ideology dominating real science.

Thomas Gold was the exception. There is some isotopic support for the theory and possible some small part of oil is abiotic, but the vast major is not.

T. Gold basically bet the farm on a well he and his backers drilled in Sweden. The conditions for hitting large supply of abiotic oil were idea. First near the surface there was an impervious cap, even though large meteor had hit the site Thousands (millions? I forget) of years ago. Its shock waves has fractured the granite like rock miles deep, making the many cracks / passage ways for the deep abiotic oil to seep up to the cap layer.

Well when they got thru the cap layer, they found no abiotic oil. (Traces of oil were found but identified as from the drill pipes.) Undeterred, they drilled deeper, but it was tough going - Those cracks, which were there as predicted and seismic tests had suggested, bent the drill and broke it off several times. Eventually most but Gold abandoned the abiotic oil theory. More importantly his backers said: "No more good money after bad investment." - Leaving this as one of the world’s most infamous dry wells.

All this from memory - Gold was based at Cornell when I was an undergraduate there.

 

“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.” — Sir Fred Hoyle, 1982

Please, we are in 21th century. Hydrocarbons of course are abiotic e very abundant. They are primordial materials.

 

Oil is made today by unicellular algae, some of which are 30-40% oil by biomass. These are ancient lineages that were around hundreds of millions of years ago. It is generally believed that rock-oil (petro-oleum) is formed from the laying down of dead algal cells along with sand/sediment, which over time formed sedimentary layers with much oil interspersed.

Coal is made by the laying down of cellulose-bearing multicellular land-plants, which subsequently were buried by sediments.

I doubt if much rock-oil was produced from dead animals, which would have been readily scavenged leaving little to produce oil.

 

So you are buying up depleted oilfields???

 

Mods, please ban OilIsMastery again.

 

Hoyle was neither a geologist, nor biologist. He and Thomas Gold argued for the steady state theory of the universe, and utter rejected the Big Bang, so clearly not every idea he ever had was undisputed truth.

Which is to say, an unsupported appeal to a supposed authority speaking outside his area of expertise is no evidence of the truth of the proposition that authority would have us believe.

 

Well, there you go. No need to drill new wells or prospect any further. They'll just refill themselves.

 

Is there some process going on that will fill the wells ?

 

He is proposing that oil production is abiotic, that it is an ongoing geologic process that does not require compressed algae and the like. If that's the case all his worries are over. Just wait and the wells will refill.

Of course, if he's wrong and modern science is correct, we have a bit of a problem.

 

Hey, who's in a hurry. Just wait a few billion years, and the fields will have maybe a 1% recharge form abiotic oil.

Actually, they slowly recharge from existing biotic oil that is far from the well bore. Going back into old wells with new frac techniques can get more oil to flow. Or wait a few thousand years and it will be close to where it had been when first drilled.

 

Some pay a very high price for oil:

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Go here to see clear large copy: http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/15359263
or expand image to see who. (<control>+) four or five times will expand. Sorry, I could not get larger copy.

I got part of it bigger:

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They find new wells all the time - it's usually hard and more expensive to get though.

It's called "Peak" oil for a reason. It's will always be around but cannot be the #1 source for energy anymore.