Joseph Brennan, one of my regularly occasional Brian’s Friday’s attenders, has taken to emailing me with useful links to things that he thinks might be bloggable. It was he who told me about these great photographs, so that I could tell you. Well, now Joe Brennan he has sent me a link to a piece by Chris Bennett, about the possibility that the world’s oil reserves may not be going to run out any time soon after all.
Personally, on the basis of zero scientific knowledge, I have never been very convinced by the idea that oil has its origins in living organisms. There just seems to be too damn much of it for that. Why has this particular life relic hung around when so much else has just vanished? And why is it all so yuckily similar looking? Life is not like that, even when it is dead. Why could oil have not bubbled up from below, on the same basis that lava does? Such were my ignorant suspicions.
Chris Bennett supplies a more scientifically educated speculation to this same effect. Oil, it is apparently now being thought, may indeed have seeped up and be seeping up still, from the depths of the earth. The organic look that it acquires is because bugs merely like to swim in it, rather than because bugs (or any other living thing) actually perished to create the stuff. From time to time, for example, oil bursts upwards into the caverns otherwise known as the regular oil fields where humans have characteristically tended to find oil before, which results in certain ever dwindling reserves mysteriously refusing to dwindle as much as they should. And so on.
If this theory comes to be accepted, this does not necessarily mean that oil companies will immediately be drilling in new ways and in new places, to new depths. It may merely, to start with, result in a general willingness to commit to continuing oil exploration and to oil-based industry, more than would otherwise have happened. It may be many decades before anyone actually gets a direct tube installed to these vast – and no doubt vastly deep and inaccessible – new oil reserves. For the time being, the oil companies may merely rely on Mother Earth having an occasional attack of the squirts into her underwear, so to speak. And on her farting too, if I understand the theory correctly. Gas is also involved in all this.
I, of course, want to believe that this is all true, if only to see the look on the faces of the environmentalists when they are eventually persuaded that the internal combustion engine is here for ever. And there is now also the fact that I have here tipped this idea as a cheap intellectual share bet, so to speak. So I am sceptical also of my scepticism about the oil-is-dead-bugs theory – or whatever is the official theory now. But this is certainly a fun fence to be sitting on.
Chris Bennett’s article was published as long ago as May 25 of this year. Has there been much discussion sparked by it? What did anyone think? Is there any truth to this notion that oil is of an entirely different origin to the one now generally accepted, and consequently that it is massively more abundant than previously assumed?
I’m fairly sure I read an article on this very topic in the NY Times science section (online). I remember thinking to myself, “Wow… there must be something to this if the NY Times can’t ignore it.”
Actually, if memory serves, the article was focused on the issue in the larger context of an impending geologists’ convention or petrolium scientists’ conference or something.
Being that my memory isn’t all that good, I’ll go with:
It was in a major U.S. newspaper (online)…
and
They didn’t outright call proponents of the inorganic theory “kooks,” but they definitely implied the hypothesis was yet to be considered “a serious competitor” to the organic hypothesis.
While the discovery of limitless oil reserves certainly would change the environmental debate substantially, key parts would bide on.
The truth(!) is, however much damage you believe carbon dioxide causes to the atmosphere*, it is better to find other ways of generating power that produce less or none. Nuclear is the clear favorite except that the very word sends some people spinning out of control.
*not as much as they suggest, but certainly more is not better
ps….
Oil is a fossil fuel, I don’t think that will change anytime soon for a variety of reasons. Scientifically it doesn’t pass muster.
Joseph
I should have used the phrase “fossil fuel” in my original posting, a phrase of which I am of course aware. That assumption that oil IS a fossil fuel, of course, is precisely the issue. There may be good reasons to assume that oil is indeed a “fossil fuel”, like, for example, in oil field after oil field, oil is found to be full to bursting with what can only be fossils and could not possibly be anything else. If such reasons abound, I would love to hear about them. But the mere fact, in the form of the mere verbal practice, that oil is CALLED a “fossil fuel” is no reason to assume that it must be such.
I’m sure there are plenty of other examples of phrases which (a) persist, but which (b) clearly embody exploded theories about what caused the thing they refer to, and I wish I could now think of a few. Maybe I will, or maybe others will.
The nearest thing to this I CAN think of is that someone argued that television would never work, for the simple reason that half the word was Latin and the other half Greek. This is a similar fallacy, I think: that something can be proved about reality ONLY from the (in this case muddled) label that conventionally describes it. Your “oil is a fossil fuel” sounds to me like proof from usage. “Television won’t work” is a disproof from misusage, but it is the same principle.
Or have I misunderstood your point?
This theory is not new — it’s been debated for some time. Good article here.
Looks like most geologists think that inorganic petroleum creation does occur, but in relatively (and commericially unviable) smaller amounts than through organic “conventional” means.
I don’t mean to say that oil is a fossil fuel simply because it is called that, there is some science behind.
Many early theories concerning the origin of oil (including one from Mendeleev) did not suggest it was an organic substance. The early theories have been disproved:
1. Origin from extraterrestrial objects like meteors was dimissed as it does not account for the seemingly massive deposits (and it violates Occam’s Razor).
2. Leftovers from a primordial earth does not account for why desposits are found in sealed strata from varying ages and not only in the eldest rocks.
3. Ongoing production in the mantle (this current theory and Mendeleev’s) is very unlikely as oil is hardly ever found in igneous rocks, large amounts of oil are not ejected from volcanoes, and by products of this proposed formation have not been found.
On the other hand evidence for organic formation is quite good. Oil reserves mainly occur in sedimentary rocks where fossils are found, they regularly have the same composition as shales found nearby, and contain traces of biochemicals that cannot be easily attributed to non organic processes.
As with everything in science, evidence will be the key, and a new theory can succeed. But until then the evidence points the other way (though it is admitted that the origin of oil is not wholly settled).
We’ll have oil forever regardless of its origin. We will never run out of resources for which property rights are attached. It’s called the Hotelling Theorem:
The atom? The greek word indicated something indivisible. 19th century chemists believed the chemical elements to be fundamental, not as composed of smaller things. Of course, the ‘splitting of the atom’ showed that to be not the case, but we still call the particles of any element, ‘atoms’.
How much of the stuff there is – ultimately – has never been the real question. All that matters is how much is worth recovering at prevailing (or expected) oil prices?
The “recoverable oil” opinion cycle is nearing a low point. From here, it can only go up. If someone will lend me the money, I’ll gamble on that!
The question this idea poses is: if it’s there, how deep is it; and how much will it cost to get that deep. Only the price tells you when to stop digging.
A physicist called Thomas Gold, who died just three weeks ago has long postulated that oil is a left over from the creation of the earth. Dr. Gold was not a crackpot, given that he correctly identified the reasons why pulsars “pulsate”.
Some years ago he conducted a drilling experiment into Granite bedrock in Sweden. Whilst the drilling had eventually to be abandoned for technical and financial reasons, they found traces of oil where convention dictated none should be found.
Try this link with leads onwards.
(Link)
Why not extract oil from living things?
1. It is renewable.
2. It has a stable production cost.
3. No one country or region can monopolize or cartel production.
4. Provides a cash crop for our subsidised friends.
5. Makes no difference to global carbon dioxide levels.
So, why not?
Actually, the “oil as fossil fuel” has been discredited for quite some time. Ask anyone in the natural gas industry.
Reason being that natural gas (which permeates upwards through rock more easily than the liquid oil) is being found at depths which predate any existence of plant / animal life on Earth.
It appears that oil and gas are being produced as part of the Earth’s maturing process (which may take a few billion more years to end), and while flora and fauna strata may have been responsible for creating some of the Earth’s reserves, the existence of far deeper deposits points to this as being a continuous rather than finite process.
Of course, using oil as heating / electricity-generating fuel is a complete waste of the resource — nukes have it beaten by a country mile in terms of the cost / renewable materials issue.
But “nuclear power” will be forever associated with the eeeevil nuclear bombs used by the American Imperialists to further their hegemony over the world’s blah blah blah blah. So the Greenies and associated socialists will always try to block nukes, in favor of totally crap processes like wind generators and solar panels, along with dreamy (and unproven) solutions like fuel cells.
Bah.
I had the good fortune to sit next to a brilliant Physicist, Stirling Colgate, at a dinner in 1978. He told me (a college freshman then, with hair!) that the Earth, like most every other astronomical body is constantly outgassing simple hydrocarbons. And that it is little wonder that extremes of temperature and pressure could mold them into more complex compounds.
I have quietly believed that ever since. What is the estimated mass of the world’s oil supplies vs. the estimated mass of all living matter? The rotten-dinosaur theory doesn’t seem to hold up.
linkage
I find it absolutely amazing, and not a little implausible, that the exact same complex hydrocarbon could be produced both by geologic processes and organic decomposition. It seems like oil/petroleum should be either one or the other, but not both.
The problem with oil is not when the reserves run out, it’s when production peaks and rolls over into permanent decline. U.S. production peaked in 1970 and has been declining ever since. In the 1980s we had a record oil drilling boom and yet production ended up lower at the end of the decade than at the beginning. North Sea oil production peaked a few years ago and is now declining. Even some OPEC countries are in decline.
So even if the story is true that oil is seeping up from below, it’s not affecting the rate at which we can pump it.
With China and India developing their own auto industries, demand for oil is soaring. Excess production capacity has virtually disappeared. When demand passes supply, prices will rocket, no matter how much oil is left in the ground.
RCD: Nah, I don’t agree with you at all there. By the standards of many other molecules that occur even in non-biological processes, fossil fuels really aren’t very complicated at all – certainly simple enough to come into being through a variety of different processes. Oil being a consequence of a mixture of biological and non-biological cases doesn’t strike me as especially unlikely at all.
I am not a geologist, but I need more evidence before I will believe that the biological origins theory is more likely for the moment. And as for “There is a lot of the stuff”, well, four billion years is a long time.
But from the point of view of fueling our civilization, it doesn’t matter very much. If you include all the oil reserves that are likely to be found if we look hard enough (and for which a substantially higher oil price will pay for the search and development) and include all the shales from which oil could be extracted if things really came to that, then it is clear that there is enough oil in the world to supply us for at least another few thousand years, even if the world’s oil resources are not being replenished in any way. And I think that it is unlikely that we will be using oil and gas as our principal energy sources in one century, let alone three or four thousand years.
The question this idea poses is: if it’s there, how deep is it; and how much will it cost to get that deep. Only the price tells you when to stop digging.
If the energy required to extract it is more than you’ll obtain via burning it, there’s no point extracting the oil for use as a fuel no matter how cheaply you can do it.
James
If Gold’s hypothesis turns out to be right, it would be a great thing for the environment — cheap, locally available natural gas could replace all the coal the Chinese are now burning (and will otherwise burn in greater quantities) and the wood the Indians are burning (and cutting down trees to obtain). These are major sources of environmental damage today and will be even more major in the near future unless India and China find cheaper affordable sources of energy as they improve their standards of living.
The Earth Sucks
Geologists have recently noticed that sea floor spreading does not invariably result in material spewing from the interior. Sometimes material is sucked into the interior and so may account for bacterial life at astonishing depths in igneous rocks where they have all they need to live and propogate.
Inquiry proceeds.
Well that’s just not true at all. It takes more energy to make a battery cell than it will ever produce, but people still keep making them. Oil is a portable fuel source, its value isn’t a sole factor of how much energy it produces.
Edmund Burke writes:
Two problems with these claims, first the Sweden one:
“During the cold war, the Swedish government blasted the bedrock to create 50-60 caverns to stockpile supplies of petroleum. Now the country faces a daunting challenge: how to clean up the residual oil that has leaked into bedrock fractures around the caverns, contaminating the ground water.”
It is therefore plausable that oil leaked through the bedrock fractures from Swedish Goverment oil stockpiles in the bedrock into Thomas Gold’s drillings.
Now the Vietnam claim, the paper seems to suggest a timeline that in the early 1980s Dr Gold does some drilling experiments, finds oil, the Vietnamese then get the whacky idea to drill for oil in bedrock and find oil in the White Tiger (Bach Ho in Vietnamese) field in the mid 1980s. The problem with this claim is:
“Bach Ho, the country’s first and largest producing oil field, was discovered in 1975 by Mobil, which abandoned the well when the U.S. withdrew from Vietnam. The well was later developed in 1986 by VietSovPetro. ”
Since Mobil was looking there it is probably safe to assume that at least part of the Bach Ho oilfield looks like a conventional reserve.
Now it is true that oil was found in a granite layer later:
“During deep drilling into the granite layer in 1987, Vietsovpetro accidentally found a layer containing large oil reserves with an oil flow of over 1,000m3 per day at each well.”
However things are a little more complicated than that, because the area of the Vietnam oilfields is also an area of magmatic granetoid formation, this seems to have happened between 88 and 112 million years ago, which is after the oil formed. So the fact that granite is found over oil does not prove that the oil has a non-biological origin, because the oil could have been formed first through biological means, and then the granite came along later.
A little at a tangent but I belive the beleif that oil will be running out “soon”, as in medium term has been prevalent since the 1920’s. I imagine that this belief will persist whether based on fact or not, keep on rpeating it and that chances are it’ll be true at some point.
I read an item on USS Clueless a while back that mentioned “mass-to-energy” conversion. I’d bet that would be a long way out beyond viable fusion power, if it’s even possible at all.
Anyone have any further info on it, or a link to some research?
james
sounds like nuclear power to me
Joseph,
It is, I guess, but the entire atom is converted to energy ala E=MC2, rather than simply bashing atoms against each other.
I’d challenge the idea that the internal combustion engine (ICE) is here to stay even if oil were to last forever. Carnot heat engines (ICE is an example) have relatively low efficiency ratings. Fuel cells are much better efficiency. It is quite likely that if oil were to be perpetually expelled from the earth in great quantities that in fairly short order, the oil would be used to create hydrogen for use in a fuel cell rather than burned in an ICE.
Several of the commenters in addition to Brian have expressed doubt that oil could come from decaying organic material, largely because the idea doesn’t ‘seem’ correct to them, if I understand what they have written.
Brian gave as his reason the fact that:
“There just seems to be too damn much of it for that. Why has this particular life relic hung around when so much else has just vanished? And why is it all so yuckily similar looking? Life is not like that, even when it is dead.”
Actually there is not too much of it at all. If one considers the amount of organic material in the shales and muddy limestones of the petroleum basins of the world, the question becomes “Why have we found so little of it converted to oil?” The cutoff varies from oil company to oil company but a TOC (total organic carbon) content of 2-4% by weight is considered the minimum amount for a sediment to be considered a source rock. On the US Gulf Coast, where I have worked for the last 32 years, there are at least a half dozen formations, (Smackover, Bossier, Pine Island, Glen Rose, Eagleford, and Midway for starters if anyone wants to challenge me on this), that contain this content of organic material over large areas of their occurrence. Since they are several hundred to several thousand feet thick over thousands of square miles, a 4% content is a very large volume of material, vastly larger than the amount of oil and gas that humankind has so far consumed. Most other petroleum basins have similar sources.
Brian asks why this has hung around when so much other life has vanished? That’s easy. The organic material that is the source material is precisely those compounds that are chemically refractory and unreactive. Kerogen is the catch-all name for them. I have heard that Chinese Gordon’s bloodstains are still visible on the steps of the Governor’s House in Khartoum. That’s kerogen for you. It’s also the stuff that makes food stains that never seem to wash out of your shirts. It is made up of porpherins – pigment type compounds like haemoglobin, tough proteins like chitin (eg: cockroach shells), perhaps a little cellulose and similar very stable organic molecules. It isn’t all alike – there are two or three varieties, depending on whether it formed from marine organisms falling into low oxygen depths and fermenting, from marshes and swamps that were buried and compressed to peat or coal, or more rarely from inland freshwater seas where restricted circulation apparently resulted in repeated episodes of de-oxygenation and organic preservation. However, in each environment the material is mostly similar because it is made up of the few refractory compounds that are left when life has decayed away. Because we are all made up of essentially the same proteins, fats and carbohydrates, our residue consists mostly of the same few compounds. If you are incredulous at the volume, you just haven’t appreciated the incredible total volume of living tissue that has existed at one time or another on the Earth. I obviously have no real idea how much, but I would be surprised if, over Earth’s history, it wasn’t equal to at least two to three times the volume of the planet. That the unrecycled refractory residue of this volume is more than sufficient to account for 4% of a few thousand feet of shale in the world’s petroleum basins shouldn’t be difficult to accept.
Someone asked why we don’t just make oil from organic material ourselves. Because nature does it much more cheaply than we can. (By the way, if we do it ourselves, it is by no means carbon dioxide free. Look at the whole process, not just a portion. For example, whether you make fertilizer with a natural gas/nitrogen plant or with a cow, you are going to emit a lot of CO2). Those refractory compounds mentioned above are low in water and high in crackable big molecules that can be broken down to oil and gas with sufficient heat and pressure (minimum is 250 to 300 degrees Fahrenheit and 2500 to 4000 feet of overburden rock- again, depending on which oil company lab you consult.) That kind of heat and pressure is available free in the earth. The tricky part is finding where the sqeezings from this great subterranean still have trickled up.
As far as the inorganic degassing of hydrocarbons is concerned, obviously it is possible. Huge amounts of methane – a very simple hydrocarbon – are present in space and on many of the planets and moons in the solar system. However. Methane, (natural gas or CH4), is a simple carbon atom with four hydrogens attached evenly around it. It is chemically pretty stable, each hydrogen’s single electron in a covalent bond with one of the four extra carbon electrons – everything nicely balanced and happy. Stability is why most of the non-stellar carbon and hydrogen in the universe exists as methane. Oil on the other hand is a complicated mixture of long chains and rings of carbon atoms, with hydrogens branching off and reconnecting in complicated ways. That is why it is often a thick liquid. If you have trouble imagining how solid kerogen (an even more complex group of longer branched molecules) can be converted to oil (by breaking them up) you should have huge difficulties explaining how, in a hot earth that breaks things down, you can make complex oil molecules from simple stable methane ones.
It’s possible, but it’s not the way to bet. And natural chemical processes are ultimately statistical.
As far as the oil in granite argument is concerned, few geologists would be surprised. At the bottom of most basins is a granite basement, the remelted remains of even older sedimentary rocks. They are invariably fractured. If they were originally exposed at the surface of the earth – usually the case, if sediments were deposited over them- then they will be weathered and corroded. They are full of porosity and they are the kettle in which the source rocks are going to be cooked. Is it very surprising then, that hydrocarbons can be found in them -even if they are “at depths which predate the existence of any plant or animal life on earth” as Kim du Toit stated? Hydrocarbons can move down or laterally as well as up – it’s just a matter of pressure gradients and pressures tend to be highest in the source rock kitchens. (By the way Kim, could you give me a reference? – I had never heard that, and frankly know of few rocks at the surface of the earth, with the exception, perhaps, of some kimberlites, that definitely predate any life.)
Della’s point about the granites occuring with oil in the island arc area is slightly more problematic, in that granite intrusions tend to be large regional things that cook most of the organics out of an area. (Oil can come in later as I just mentioned, but any organics already in the area are usually cooked out.) I suspect that the igneous rocks in question are either old granites that were drawn down into a subduction zone where drifting areas of crust are forced under other areas of crust (That is why there is an island arc there.) Or, if they are not old, are not granites; as granite magma chambers just don’t occur that way. As one slab of crust slides or ‘subducts’ under another, it heats by the naturally occuring radioactivity that is present in most surface rocks. When it is underground, however, it is incredibly well insulated so the temperature builds. Eventually it melts the surrounding rocks. Because fracturing and high pressure steam is usually present in these situations, this melted rock can move toward the surface relatively easily. This is how much of the radioactively generated heat energy is conducted to the surface. Because the molten rock moves to the surface in dibs and dabs (instead of as a molten mass hundreds of miles in area like real granites in places like the cores of mountain ranges – think: the Rockies or the Andes), it doesn’t cook the organics in an area and may actually improve oil generation. Igneous rock terminology is complicated, and changes with academic fashions. For these and other reasons, I just can’t see a granite magma chamber in an island arc setting even if the article calls it that.
My apologies for being so verbose. I haven’t posted much lately so I hope the editors will indulge me.
By the way, I firmly believe that the drop in oil and gas discoveries is not a geological problem and perhaps not even entirely an economic one. It is first and foremost a matter of the sociology of the oil industry and investors as they have been molded by political influences. That is an excessive digression however.
Re: the Bennett article about the “Mystery of Eugene Island 330”. I’ll check and make sure tomorrow (and report back if I’m wrong) but there appears to be little mystery. Eugene Island 330 is a salt dome field like a hundred others in the Gulf of Mexico. I happen to be working on another right now.
They have been reworked and redrilled, deeper and more precisely as seismic imaging improved over the last several decades. One finds more oil in deeper and older beds with more drilling. So? This doesn’t prove that new oil is moving into the reservoirs, only that new reservoirs are being found or that their limits are being determined more accurately.
There are, in fact, a few reservoirs that seem to be getting new injections of additional oil or gas. This can be seen by pressure increases after the reservoir has been produced. These may be hooked more directly than usual to a souce rock kitchen at depth. Most actively generating source rocks are still below the reach of current drilling technology, although we are approaching these depths. If our ideas about organic generation of oil and gas are correct, it is to be expected that a few examples of active migration of hydrocarbons into reservoirs should be found. This doesn’t invalidate the organic theory, it supports it. (I doesn’t invalidate Gold either for that matter, although we have examples in organic areas and he has none in inorganic areas).
Bennett should do better research or else stick to what he understands. This is little different from the paranoids who are convinced that the doctors are all wrong and that magnetic copper bracelets will cure all sorts of deadly diseases.
In answer to Joseph’s question why we use oil rather than extracting fuel from growing stuff, the answer is that oil is so unbelievably plentiful that it still works out much cheaper to dig it up than to grow stuff.
I tried to work this out last week, but got a bit tied up in “how many bushels of rapeseed to a barrel of oil”, but as far as I can see general organic stuff is about 5 times cheaper if you dig it up than if you grow it.
This Naval Nuke thinks wind power is the wave of the future.
I hate the thought of burning up all that uranium.
Why? Because uranium atoms are harder to make than hydrocarbons.
At the current time wind electricity in America (for the latest plants) costs less than natural gas electricity. Wind in America makes sense as a hedge against natural gas price rises. Since wind is dispatchable in the same time frame as natural gas generators they are complimentary energy sources.
BTW I wrote an article on Thomas Gold a few years back (just after 9/11). You can google it.
As money is put into bigger wind turbines the cost is coming down the curve as predicted. In the next few years as production turbines reach the 3 to 5 MW peak size wind at the bus bar will cost the same as nuke electricity. As the turbines get larger than that ( projections show that with current materials the largest economical turbine size is on the order of 12 to 15 MW peak) wind will cost less than nuke electricity.
In addition the distributed and non-scary nature of wind makes it less vulnerable to effective terrorism. Holding a wind plant hostage and holding a nuke plant hostage are not even in the same category.
The #1 thing holding back nuke energy is the wind cost curve. It makes no sense to build a plant that lasts 30 to 40 years whose output will decline in value significantly over the life of the plant. It is not just the decline (that has actually been happening since 1880 and is factored in to the economics) it is the fact that the rate of decline which has stagnated for a few decades is about to increase rapidly.
Environmentalism is not the only thing holding back nukes. Reality is also holding them back.
Another thing nukes have going against them is insurance. The potential risks are so high that no private insurer will touch them. Only the government has enough potential resources to cover the risk. I will believe nukes are competitive when you can get the Chernobyl risk insured privately. Until that time I think nukes should be limited to warships and bomb making facilities.
In additiion, a viable nuclear power industry is not in America’s security interest from a proliferation standpoint. Too much weapons work can be covered up as “power production” research.
Andrew,
I knew a farmer in America who had a DOE contract to look into growing some kind of grass to feed power plants.
The economics were pretty good through harvest. Then came the cost of transporting the fuel to the burner. Total economic loser. A lot of that cost is probably due to hauling around the water remaining in the plant material and its lower fuel value due to the water.
Right now the only renewable that makes large scale economic sense (in terms of MWs deployed) is utility scale wind. Small wind projects and solar electricity are viable only in situations where connecting to the grid is prohibitive or as a hobby.
Brian,
The phrase you are looking for is a simple one “sunrise”.
Of course we know the sun only appears to rise. What actually happense is that as the earth turns the sun is eclipsed by the earth.
The sun has been “rising” so long that we forgotten what we have known for some hundreds of years.
Doug,
As I understand Gold he does not claim complex hydrocarbons are being formed from methane. His claim is that the hydrocarbons and methane originated in the same place: space.
I’m sure that a few more decades of space and earth research will clear up the question. It is possible that the current study of the moons of Saturn may shed light on the question.
So far each theory has points not explained by the other. I lean towards Gold but remain a skeptic.
Joseph:
“Why not extract oil from living things?”
Lots of interesting things happening in this sphere. For starters, here
The quote “Television? The word is half Greek, half Latin. No good can come of it.” is attributed to C.P. Scott It was not an assertion of the impossibility of TV, more an outburst of donnish irritation at what he saw as an improper neologism. And I have met people who have said that he turned out to be right!
Some people still don’t seem to believe that oil was formed by organic processes, so I’ll do some sums that prove that even one species of plankton in a small area of the worlds oceans could have created the worlds oil in a reasonable time frame:
Brian Micklethwait writes:
Saudi Arabia has oil reserves of 260 billion barrels of oil, this is estimated to be about a quarter of the worlds total reserves. One barrel of oil weighs 0.1364 tonnes, therefore at a rough guess there are 142,401,600,000 tonnes of oil in the ground.
Krill is a species of plankton that is common in the Antartic Ocean, some estimates have put the number of Krill in the Antartic Ocean at 200 million tonnes. Krill can have a lifespan up to seven years, but it also has a lot of predators, so the average Krill won’t live that long. For the sake of this example we will assume that the average Krill lives seven years, dies of old age and drops to the bottom and goes on to form oil some time later.
It will therefore take 4984 years for the mass of Krill corpses to equal the mass of all the oil in the world, if we assume that Krill are converted into oil with a 0.01% efficiency then it will take 49.8 million years for one species of plankton in a small part of the oceans of the world to concevably create all the oil in the world. This is less than the amount of time that it is thought that oil creation happened.
How could anyone know when or if we will run out of oil when known reserves and consumption rates are not static numbers in the first place ?
Known reserves have increased, not decreased over the past couple of decades.
The Conagra turkey-guts-to-oil plant was covered on Samizdata last year as I recall. Although some technical hiccups have delayed it this plant is now approaching production. The plant is 85% efficient and produces a diesel-like oil at prices competitive with commercial diesel.
My father (a geologist) is 60 this year. He studied Chemistry and Geology at the University of London. He never ceases to remind me that proposing plate techtonics during his time at University would have made one a laughing stock.
That said, he is a pesimist regarding the oil situation. Supplying the Chinese alone he thinks will cause major problems for the future. I shall pass him this article and see what he says.
Ugh. For some reason I typed the opposite of what I meant earlier in this thread. The prefix “non” got left out. What I meant to say was “I need more evidence before I will believe that the non-biological origins theory is more likely”.
(Of course I could use my demi-god like powers on Samzidata to go back and change it, but that just wouldn’t be right).
Simple way to prove the theory. Go into space. Find a geologically active planet, known NOT to have harboured lifeforms.
Dig, and drill. If you find oil, say bye bye to the ‘fossil’ theory. And snicker at the outraged cries of the greenies as the ICE engine goes interstellar.
Could Mars or Venus work for this? Comments?
TWG
I think the talk of non-biological oil is pretty academic. About 65% of current fields are in decline, our own North Sea and Norway are declining at about 6% per annum and the USA has been on a downer for 34 years (about half max production now).
In other words, refilling reserves are not happening.
I would comment that the stated “huge” reserves of 260 billion barrels in Saudi Arabia would only supply the current world demand of 30 billion barrels per annum for nine years!
I don’t believe oil is renewable. I have a feeling that we have recently peaked or will do so shortly. The price of oil does cause people to drive less. People will continue to reduce their usuage as the price rises. Two years ago, my family thought it was nothing to take a 30 minute to an hour drive for shopping or entertainment. We now decuss such drive long and hard and go less often.