Point/Counterpoint: Sustainable Oil?

[Dionysos]

POINT:

http://worldnetdaily.com/news/articl...TICLE_ID=38645

About 80 miles off of the coast of Louisiana lies a mostly submerged mountain, the top of which is known as Eugene Island. The portion underwater is an eerie-looking, sloping tower jutting up from the depths of the Gulf of Mexico, with deep fissures and perpendicular faults which spontaneously spew natural gas. A significant reservoir of crude oil was discovered nearby in the late '60s, and by 1970, a platform named Eugene 330 was busily producing about 15,000 barrels a day of high-quality crude oil.

By the late '80s, the platform's production had slipped to less than 4,000 barrels per day, and was considered pumped out. Done. Suddenly, in 1990, production soared back to 15,000 barrels a day, and the reserves which had been estimated at 60 million barrels in the '70s, were recalculated at 400 million barrels. Interestingly, the measured geological age of the new oil was quantifiably different than the oil pumped in the '70s.

Analysis of seismic recordings revealed the presence of a "deep fault" at the base of the Eugene Island reservoir which was gushing up a river of oil from some deeper and previously unknown source.

Similar results were seen at other Gulf of Mexico oil wells. Similar results were found in the Cook Inlet oil fields in Alaska. Similar results were found in oil fields in Uzbekistan. Similarly in the Middle East, where oil exploration and extraction have been underway for at least the last 20 years, known reserves have doubled. Currently there are somewhere in the neighborhood of 680 billion barrels of Middle East reserve oil.

Creating that much oil would take a big pile of dead dinosaurs and fermenting prehistoric plants. Could there be another source for crude oil?

An intriguing theory now permeating oil company research staffs suggests that crude oil may actually be a natural inorganic product, not a stepchild of unfathomable time and organic degradation. The theory suggests there may be huge, yet-to-be-discovered reserves of oil at depths that dwarf current world estimates.

The theory is simple: Crude oil forms as a natural inorganic process which occurs between the mantle and the crust, somewhere between 5 and 20 miles deep. The proposed mechanism is as follows:

* Methane (CH4) is a common molecule found in quantity throughout our solar system – huge concentrations exist at great depth in the Earth.

* At the mantle-crust interface, roughly 20,000 feet beneath the surface, rapidly rising streams of compressed methane-based gasses hit pockets of high temperature causing the condensation of heavier hydrocarbons. The product of this condensation is commonly known as crude oil.

* Some compressed methane-based gasses migrate into pockets and reservoirs we extract as "natural gas."

* In the geologically "cooler," more tectonically stable regions around the globe, the crude oil pools into reservoirs.

* In the "hotter," more volcanic and tectonically active areas, the oil and natural gas continue to condense and eventually to oxidize, producing carbon dioxide and steam, which exits from active volcanoes.

* Periodically, depending on variations of geology and Earth movement, oil seeps to the surface in quantity, creating the vast oil-sand deposits of Canada and Venezuela, or the continual seeps found beneath the Gulf of Mexico and Uzbekistan.

* Periodically, depending on variations of geology, the vast, deep pools of oil break free and replenish existing known reserves of oil.

There are a number of observations across the oil-producing regions of the globe that support this theory, and the list of proponents begins with Mendelev (who created the periodic table of elements) and includes Dr.Thomas Gold (founding director of Cornell University Center for Radiophysics and Space Research) and Dr. J.F. Kenney of Gas Resources Corporations, Houston, Texas.

In his 1999 book, "The Deep Hot Biosphere," Dr. Gold presents compelling evidence for inorganic oil formation. He notes that geologic structures where oil is found all correspond to "deep earth" formations, not the haphazard depositions we find with sedimentary rock, associated fossils or even current surface life.

He also notes that oil extracted from varying depths from the same oil field have the same chemistry – oil chemistry does not vary as fossils vary with increasing depth. Also interesting is the fact that oil is found in huge quantities among geographic formations where assays of prehistoric life are not sufficient to produce the existing reservoirs of oil. Where then did it come from?

Another interesting fact is that every oil field throughout the world has outgassing helium. Helium is so often present in oil fields that helium detectors are used as oil-prospecting tools. Helium is an inert gas known to be a fundamental product of the radiological decay or uranium and thorium, identified in quantity at great depths below the surface of the earth, 200 and more miles below. It is not found in meaningful quantities in areas that are not producing methane, oil or natural gas. It is not a member of the dozen or so common elements associated with life. It is found throughout the solar system as a thoroughly inorganic product.

Even more intriguing is evidence that several oil reservoirs around the globe are refilling themselves, such as the Eugene Island reservoir – not from the sides, as would be expected from cocurrent organic reservoirs, but from the bottom up.

Dr. Gold strongly believes that oil is a "renewable, primordial soup continually manufactured by the Earth under ultrahot conditions and tremendous pressures. As this substance migrates toward the surface, it is attached by bacteria, making it appear to have an organic origin dating back to the dinosaurs."

Smaller oil companies and innovative teams are using this theory to justify deep oil drilling in Alaska and the Gulf of Mexico, among other locations, with some success. Dr. Kenney is on record predicting that parts of Siberia contain a deep reservoir of oil equal to or exceeding that already discovered in the Middle East.

Could this be true?

In August 2002, in the "Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (US)," Dr. Kenney published a paper, which had a partial title of "The genesis of hydrocarbons and the origin of petroleum." Dr. Kenney and three Russian coauthors conclude:

The Hydrogen-Carbon system does not spontaneously evolve hydrocarbons at pressures less than 30 Kbar, even in the most favorable environment. The H-C system evolves hydrocarbons under pressures found in the mantle of the Earth and at temperatures consistent with that environment.

He was quoted as stating that "competent physicists, chemists, chemical engineers and men knowledgeable of thermodynamics have known that natural petroleum does not evolve from biological materials since the last quarter of the 19th century."

Deeply entrenched in our culture is the belief that at some point in the relatively near future we will see the last working pump on the last functioning oil well screech and rattle, and that will be that. The end of the Age of Oil. And unless we find another source of cheap energy, the world will rapidly become a much darker and dangerous place.

If Dr. Gold and Dr. Kenney are correct, this "the end of the world as we know it" scenario simply won't happen. Think about it ... while not inexhaustible, deep Earth reserves of inorganic crude oil and commercially feasible extraction would provide the world with generations of low-cost fuel. Dr. Gold has been quoted saying that current worldwide reserves of crude oil could be off by a factor of over 100.

A Hedberg Conference, sponsored by the American Association of Petroleum Geologists, was scheduled to discuss and publicly debate this issue. Papers were solicited from interested academics and professionals. The conference was scheduled to begin June 9, 2003, but was canceled at the last minute. A new date has yet to be set.

[Dionysos]

COUNTERPOINT:

http://articles.findarticles.com/p/a...7/ai_100755208

Geoscientists are cringing as news reports dredge up what they have long considered a preposterous assertion about the origin of oil: That none of the fossil fuels found on this planet come from fossils. The idea, heavily debated in Russia during the 1950s and 1960s, holds that the world's oil is not made of decomposed biological organisms; rather, it forms inorganically at near-mantle depths then migrates up to the crust.

The newest incarnation comes from J.F. Kenney, a self-proclaimed oil and gas driller from Houston, Texas, who worked with three Russian scientists, including Vladimir Kutcherov of the Russian State University of Oil and Gas. Their paper on inorganic hydrocarbon formation, published in the August 20, 2002, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), has generated coverage in Nature, The Economist, and New Scientist and led Kenney to an interview on National Public Radio (NPR). PNAS published the paper at the request of Academy member Howard Reiss, a chemical physicist at the University of California at Los Angeles. As per the PNAS guidelines for members communicating papers, Reiss obtained reviews of the paper from at least two referees from different institutions (not affiliated with the authors) and shepherded the report through revisions.

The paper examined thermodynamic arguments that say methane is the only organic hydrocarbon to exist within Earth's crust. The report also discussed the hypothesis that high pressures of 25 to 50 kilobar or more are needed for establishing natural petroleum hydrocarbon molecules. The authors also included a description of laboratory experiments in Moscow that created petroleum products from marble, water, and iron oxide under 50 kilobar of pressure and 1,500-degree Celsius temperatures.

But the news stories, Kenney says, are written on the premise that "I have 'developed a thermodynamic argument that demonstrates that the hydrocarbon molecules of natural petroleum cannot evolve spontaneously at the low pressures and temperatures of the near-surface crust of the Earth.' Such is absolute nonsense. Many geologists would agree. But, Kenney adds, "The fact that the hydrocarbon molecules which comprise natural petroleum cannot evolve spontaneously at the low pressures and temperatures of the near-surface crust of the Earth has been known by competent physicists, chemists, and chemical engineers for over a century. In my article, I only reviewed this knowledge briefly, using the efficient formalism of modern thermodynamics."

Kenney's slap in the face to the competence of modern geologists is nor winning him any converts. Even astrophysicist Thomas Gold of Cornell University, who wrote two books on the subject of inorganic oil on Earth, is surprised by the media's response. There is nothing new about any mix of hydrogen and carbon at pressures of 40 kilobar or so, and temperatures of greater than 800 degrees Celsius, forming oil."

Most commercial drilling occurs in sedimentary rock where source material temperatures range between 75 and 200 degrees Celsius. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Gold spearheaded a project, which he says also involved Kenney, to illustrate the prospects of abiogenic oil and gas by drilling into crystalline rock in Sweden. But the granite did not yield an economically viable result.

Still, Kenney appears undaunted. During the interview on NPR, he said he found, while working with Kutcherov over the last ten years, inorganic oil and gas fields in the northern flank of the Dnepro-Donetsk basin in the Ukraine that are greater than the entire reserves in Alaska.

Kenney and his Russian colleagues' paper in PNAS is "an excellent and rigorous treatment of the theoretical and experimental aspects for abiotic hydrocarbon formation deep in the Earth," says organic geochemist Scott Imbus of Chevron-Texaco Corp. "Unfortunately, it has little or nothing to do with the origins of commercial fossil fuel deposits."

While geologists agree that crude oil can come from inorganic means, the majority of commercially recovered petroleum, they say, is organic. And they are frustrated with advocates of this alternative theory who dismiss evidence of a biological origin or interpret organics in crude oil as contaminants. Such an idea is anathema to the well-established understanding that biomarkers in petroleum are a result of living organisms transforming the complex molecules, dying, and then being subjected to burial processes that turn the biomarkets into petroleum products.

The idea of finding an abundance of crude oil ready for the tap at depths currently unreachable is tantalizing. But, says geochemist Alexei Milkov of the Deep Ocean Exploration Institute at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and a graduate of Saint-Petersburg State University in Russia, "I've never met an industry geologist that uses abiogenic theory to find oil and gas fields, and that includes Russian industry geologists. These guys pay money for mistakes and can't afford using wrong theories to continue exploration." A key factor in deciding whether to put money in exploration of a frontier basin is the potential quality and extension of source rock, Milkov adds. "This strategy apparently works for them so far."

That's a pity, says Roger Sassen, deputy director of Resource Geosciences, a geochemical and environmental research group of Texas A&M University.

"The potential that inorganic hydrocarbons, especially methane and a few other gases, might exist at enormous depth in the crust is an idea that could use a little more discussion. However, nor from people who take theories to the point of absurdity," he says. "This is an idea that needs to be looked into at some point as we start running our of energy. But no one who is objective discusses the issue at this time."