On April 16, Newsday, the Long Island newspaper, published a startling report that old oil fields in the Gulf of Mexico were somehow being refilled. That is, new oil was being discovered in fields where it previously had not existed. Scientists, led by Mahlon Kennicutt of Texas A&M University, speculate that the new oil is surging upward from deposits well below those currently in production. "Very light oil and gas were being injected from below, even as the producing was going on," he said. Although it is not yet known whether this is a worldwide phenomenon or commercially important, the new discovery suggests that there may be far more oil and gas within the Earth's core than previously thought.
Kennicutt is not the first to suggest that vast hydrocarbon deposits may lie well below those currently known. In 1995, the New York Times reported that geochemist Jean Whelan of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts had also found evidence that oil was moving upward into reservoirs from somewhere far deeper.
With growing improvements in technology that are making possible oil drilling at greater and greater depths, it may soon be economically feasible to explore and produce oil from these deep deposits. The existence of oil much farther below the surface than it was previously thought to exist raises new questions about the origins of oil and natural gas. It has commonly been thought that they are the decayed remains of long dead plants and animals. However, as hydrocarbons are found at extreme depths, this explanation becomes increasingly implausible. Astronomer Thomas Gold of Cornell University has long been dissatisfied with the dead dinosaur theory of oil's origins. He argues that oil and gas are in fact the remains of methane left over from the Earth's origin. Methane, he points out, is one of the most common minerals in the universe. When the stars and planets were formed eons ago, it was one of the central building blocks from which matter formed.
If Gold's theory is true, then it makes sense that we would continue to find hydrocarbons everywhere within the Earth's core, and not just at the surface, where plants and animals exist. Thus the new research is at least consistent with Gold's theory, even if it remains to be proven.
The new scientific evidence that energy supplies may be vastly greater than previously imagined is only the latest blow to the doomsayers. Such people have been around for 200 years, preaching that mankind has reached the limit to growth because we have found all the oil there is to be found. For at least a century, for example, the U.S. Geological Survey has consistently reported that America had only about 10 years worth of oil left.
In defence of the Geological Survey, it was referring only to proven reserves. These are fields that have been explored, and where estimates have been made regarding their size and production potential. But of course, exploration is a continuing process, so new reserves are discovered all the time. Economist Julian Simon long made the point that the size of proven reserves cannot be divorced from the price of oil. At current price levels, only about 40 percent of oil can be extracted from existing fields; the remaining 60 percent, which is known to exist, cannot be produced economically and is therefore not included in proven reserve estimates. However, higher prices and advanced technology can easily make it profitable to expand production in existing fields.
Higher prices also encourage exploration into areas that geologists strongly suspect to have oil, but where drilling costs are too high at present. Only a small portion of the Earth's surface has ever been explored for oil, and there is no reason to believe that there are not many large deposits yet to be discovered.
If oil were really becoming more scarce, we would expect to see prices rising over time. In fact, the real price of oil, adjusted for inflation, has been remarkably stable at around $15 per barrel. Temporary price spikes by OPEC (the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries) have not proved sustainable because they brought forth new supplies, encouraged substitution of oil with coal or gas, and stimulated conservation by consumers and businesses.
In short, even if the new scientific evidence about oil is wrong, one can still say the world will never run out of it. Higher prices will always bring new supplies to market. As Bjorn Lomberg points out in his new book, The Sceptical Environmentalist (Cambridge University Press), $40 per barrel oil will immediately increase world reserves from a 40 years supply to 250 years because vast known oil shale deposits will become economically viable.
Of all the things we have to worry about in this day and age, running out of oil should not be one of them.
Bruce Bartlett, a senior fellow for the National Center for Policy Analysis in Washington, D.C., writes for Creators Syndicate, 5777 W. Century, Suite 700, Los Angeles, Calif. 90045.
OIL - A RENEWABLE and ABIOTIC FUEL?
"Oil is often called a 'fossil' fuel; the idea being that it comes from formerly living organisms. This may have been plausible back when oil wells were drilled into the fossil layers of the earth's crust; but today, great quantities of oil are found in deeper wells that are found below the level of any fossils. How could then oil have come from fossils, or decomposed former living matter, if it exists in rock formations far below layers of fossils the evidence of formerly living organisms? It must not come from living matter at all!"
Crude
oil was made to be thought of as "Fossil" fuel by the Nineteenth Century
oil producers to create the concept that it was of limited supply and therefore
extremely valuable. This fits with the "Depletion"allowance philosophical
scam and current day price fixing. During one of our C.S.I.S. "International Nights"
(1978) the Common Market Energy boss, M. Montibrial of France, told
us that while petroleum was being marketed then for $20.00 per barrel
or more, it cost no more than 25 cents per barrel at the wellhead. There
is our petroleum problem! We were paying more than $1.50-$1.60 per gallon,
one 42nd of a barrel, at that time.
Petroleum discussion
Update for March 1997
FOSSIL-FUEL THEORY DEBUNKED: OIL, GAS DEPOSITS CALLED
PRIMORDIAL
by Toledo Blade
SEATTLE
- The public's most widely known piece of geological knowledge--how
petroleum and natural-gas deposits formed on Earth -- is false, a noted
scientist says. Surprisingly, his campaign to rewrite school textbooks
and encyclopaedias is getting grudging support from some geologists,
who acknowledge that petroleum's origins may be dramatically different
from what people believe.
Millions of Americans learned in grade school that oil deposits
originated in the age of dinosaurs, when vegetation in lush forests
was buried and subjected to high heat and pressure. Those extreme conditions
supposedly transformed the hydrocarbons in vegetation into the hydrocarbons
of petroleum.
"That's nonsense," snapped Thomas Gold, a scientist at Cornell
University. "There's not a shred of evidence from chemistry, geology,
or any other science to support it. It has no place in textbooks and
school classrooms."
In appearances at the annual meeting of The American Association
for the Advancement of Science in Seattle here that ended Thursday,
Gold repeatedly challenged geologists to reconsider and reject the conventional
theory.
Gold also presented evidence that oil and gas deposits on Earth
are primordial. That means they came with the planet. They were part
of the original raw material that formed the sun and planets, and deposited
deep below Earth's surface when the planet formed 4.5 billion years ago.
Some of the oil gradually oozes upward from these original deposits
100 to 200 miles below the surface and collects where oil drillers can
reach it.
In one presentation, Gold described shafts that he and associates
drilled in an ancient meteorite impact crater in Sweden. They drilled
into a kind of rock that was not sedimentary, not associated with the
sediments believed to produce oil deposits. At a depth of about 4 miles,
they encountered a hydrocarbon oil similar to light petroleum that Gold
believes was primordial oil. He noted a variety of evidence to support
the belief. Gold estimated that this single site contained "more petroleum
than all of Saudi Arabia." With current technology, however, pumping
it out would be impossible, he added. Gold contended that many other planets
and planetary bodies in the solar system have similar deep deposits of
hydrocarbons, which are the stuff of oil and natural gas. Gold argues
that a primordial origin for petroleum is the only way to explain its chemical
composition.
Petroleum originating from plant matter decayed by bacteria,
similar to bacteria that decay backyard garden-compost piles, would
resemble a microbial product. Instead, petroleum is chemically similar
to a pure hydrocarbon that has been contaminated with microbial material.
That contamination, he argues, occurred as petroleum seeped upward through
rock now known to contain enormous amounts of bacterial life. In moving
upward, petroleum also collected helium, explaining why oil wells are such
a rich source of helium.
Two
days after I read his statement I encountered the following statement
in a newspaper I deeply respect:
"Any geologist will tell you, well, most geologists will tell
you that OIL IS CREATED BY THE MAGMA OF THE EARTH. The oil wells in Pennsylvania
that were pumped out dry at the turn of the century and capped are now
filled with oil again."
During
one meeting we took a "Buffet Break" At the table with us were four
young geologists busily talking about Petroleum. At one point one of
them made reference to "Petroleum as organic matter, and a fossil fuel."
Right out of the Rockefeller bible.
Kantrowitz turned to the geologist beside him and asked,
"Do you really believe that petroleum is a fossil fuel?" The man said,
"Certainly" and all four of them joined in. Kantrowitz listened quietly
and then said, "The deepest fossil ever found has been at about 16,000
feet below sea level; yet we are getting oil from wells drilled to 30,000
and more. How could fossil fuel get down there? If it was once living
matter, it had to be on the surface. If it did turn into petroleum, at
or near the surface, how could it ever get to such depths? What is heavier
Oil or Water?" Water: so it would go down, not oil. Oil would be on top,
if it were "organic" and "lighter."
____________________________________________________________________________
second
posting July 9
Also I am trying to locate a book by "Thomas Gold" that explains the geological science behind the abyssal abiotic origins for petroleum and demolishes the accepted theory of biological surface deposition for oil deposits.
"The overwhelming preponderance of geological evidence compels the conclusion that crude oil and natural petroleum gas have no intrinsic connection with biological matter originating near the surface of the Earth. They are primordial materials which have been erupted from great depths."
Academician Professor Vladimir B. Porfir’yev, senior petroleum exploration geologist for the U.S.S.R., at the All-Union Conference on Petroleum and Petroleum Geology, Moscow, 1956.