Yep!
REH From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of D and N Sent: Wednesday, September 28, 2011 5:25 PM To: RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION, EDUCATION Subject: [Futurework] biotic vs. abiotic oil theories Below are a couple of articles on abiotic oil, which I dug up after I began reading Steve Berry's new book, The Emperor's Tomb. To learn about these vast reserves was a bonus, since I was only expecting to learn more about Chinese history as I quickly turned the pages of another engaging mystery book. (Keith, you might enjoy this one.)The suggestion of repeated suppression/destruction of each previous dynasty's cultural base is framed as overarching ideological stagnation and cultural amnesia that resulted in continual national underachievement and sadly despotism as a way of life (hopefully soon to change.) This, despite the fact that in the past, people from all over the world flocked to China because of its innovation. We've heard of the printing press first originating in China, agriculture, the clock, glazed pottery, rotary mills, stirrups, sails, and the compass. They even drilled for oil 2500 years ago. Not only crude, but also natural gas, and used it in their daily lives. Today, they are dependent primarily upon imports, and have reserves that would last no more than 10 days. Trick is, if just two straits, Hormuz or Malacca, were ever to be blockaded, China would be brought to a halt. And I guess that's one reason why the US isn't so worried about their biggest debt holder holding them out to dry. Where Bro Jon has written about vast crude reserves actually making Russia the world's leading producer, even back at the time of Khrushchev, it appears that today the real reason for its leading world producer status has more to do with their knowledge around abiotic reserves, having discovered a few major ones. Take note from below: The 2003 arrest of Russian Mikhail Khodorkovsky, of Yukos Oil, took place just before he could sell a dominant stake in Yukos to ExxonMobil after a private meeting with Dick Cheney. Had Exxon got the stake they would have control of the world's largest resource of geologists and engineers trained in the a-biotic techniques of deep drilling. And also note: Hydrocarbons have been proven to exist elsewhere in the solar system. Titan moon <http://www.green-planet-solar-energy.com/titan-moon.html> , which orbits Saturn, is saturated with them. Its atmosphere, surface liquid and and even sand dunes are made from hydrocarbons. While the moon is considerably smaller than Earth it is estimated to possess many thousands of times the oil reserves of Earth on the surface alone. NASA has found no evidence of past or present life on this moon so it can only be assumed that these hydrocarbons were generated by a means other than the fossilization of organic remains. Natalia Confessions of an "ex" Peak Oil Believer By F William Engdahl, September 14, 2007 The good news is that panic scenarios about the world running out of oil anytime soon are wrong. The bad news is that the price of oil is going to continue to rise. Peak Oil is not our problem. Politics is. Big Oil wants to sustain high oil prices. Dick Cheney and friends are all too willing to assist. On a personal note, I've researched questions of petroleum, since the first oil shocks of the 1970's. I was intrigued in 2003 with something called Peak Oil theory. It seemed to explain the otherwise inexplicable decision by Washington to risk all in a military move on Iraq. Peak Oil advocates, led by former BP geologist Colin Campbell, and Texas banker Matt Simmons, argued that the world faced a new crisis, an end to cheap oil, or Absolute Peak Oil, perhaps by 2012, perhaps by 2007. Oil was supposedly on its last drops. They pointed to our soaring gasoline and oil prices, to the declines in output of North Sea and Alaska and other fields as proof they were right. According to Campbell, the fact that no new North Sea-size fields had been discovered since the North Sea in the late 1960's was proof. He reportedly managed to convince the International Energy Agency and the Swedish government. That, however, does not prove him correct. Intellectual fossils? The Peak Oil school rests its theory on conventional Western geology textbooks, most by American or British geologists, which claim oil is a 'fossil fuel,' a biological residue or detritus of either fossilized dinosaur remains or perhaps algae, hence a product in finite supply. Biological origin is central to Peak Oil theory, used to explain why oil is only found in certain parts of the world where it was geologically trapped millions of years ago. That would mean that, say, dead dinosaur remains became compressed and over tens of millions of years fossilized and trapped in underground reservoirs perhaps 4-6,000 feet below the surface of the earth. In rare cases, so goes the theory, huge amounts of biological matter should have been trapped in rock formations in the shallower ocean offshore as in the Gulf of Mexico or North Sea or Gulf of Guinea. Geology should be only about figuring out where these pockets in the layers of the earth , called reservoirs, lie within certain sedimentary basins. An entirely alternative theory of oil formation has existed since the early 1950's in Russia, almost unknown to the West. It claims conventional American biological origins theory is an unscientific absurdity that is un-provable. They point to the fact that western geologists have repeatedly predicted finite oil over the past century, only to then find more, lots more. Not only has this alternative explanation of the origins of oil and gas existed in theory. The emergence of Russia and prior of the USSR as the world's largest oil producer and natural gas producer has been based on the application of the theory in practice. This has geopolitical consequences of staggering magnitude. Necessity: the mother of invention In the 1950's the Soviet Union faced 'Iron Curtain' isolation from the West. The Cold War was in high gear. Russia had little oil to fuel its economy. Finding sufficient oil indigenously was a national security priority of the highest order. Scientists at the Institute of the Physics of the Earth of the Russian Academy of Sciences and the Institute of Geological Sciences of the Ukraine Academy of Sciences began a fundamental inquiry in the late 1940's: where does oil come from? In 1956, Prof. Vladimir Porfir'yev announced their conclusions: '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.' The Soviet geologists had turned Western orthodox geology on its head. They called their theory of oil origin the 'a-biotic' theory-non-biological-to distinguish from the Western biological theory of origins. If they were right, oil supply on earth would be limited only by the amount of hydrocarbon constituents present deep in the earth at the time of the earth's formation. Availability of oil would depend only on technology to drill ultra-deep wells and explore into the earth's inner regions. They also realized old fields could be revived to continue producing, so called self-replentishing fields. They argued that oil is formed deep in the earth, formed in conditions of very high temperature and very high pressure, like that required for diamonds to form. 'Oil is a primordial material of deep origin which is transported at high pressure via 'cold' eruptive processes into the crust of the earth,' Porfir'yev stated. His team dismissed the idea that oil is was biological residue of plant and animal fossil remains as a hoax designed to perpetuate the myth of limited supply. Defying conventional geology That radically different Russian and Ukrainian scientific approach to the discovery of oil allowed the USSR to develop huge gas and oil discoveries in regions previously judged unsuitable, according to Western geological exploration theories, for presence of oil. The new petroleum theory was used in the early 1990's, well after the dissolution of the USSR, to drill for oil and gas in a region believed for more than forty-five years, to be geologically barren-the Dnieper-Donets Basin in the region between Russia and Ukraine. Following their a-biotic or non-fossil theory of the deep origins of petroleum, the Russian and Ukrainian petroleum geophysicists and chemists began with a detailed analysis of the tectonic history and geological structure of the crystalline basement of the Dnieper-Donets Basin. After a tectonic and deep structural analysis of the area, they made geophysical and geochemical investigations. A total of sixty one wells were drilled, of which thirty seven were commercially productive, an extremely impressive exploration success rate of almost sixty percent. The size of the field discovered compared with the North Slope of Alaska. By contrast, US wildcat drilling was considered successful with a ten percent success rate. Nine of ten wells are typically "dry holes." That Russian geophysics experience in finding oil and gas was tightly wrapped in the usual Soviet veil of state security during the Cold War era, and went largely unknown to Western geophysicists, who continued to teach fossil origins and, hence, the severe physical limits of petroleum. Slowly it began to dawn on some strategists in and around the Pentagon well after the 2003 Iraq war, that the Russian geophysicists might be on to something of profound strategic importance. If Russia had the scientific know-how and Western geology not, Russia possessed a strategic trump card of staggering geopolitical import. It was not surprising that Washington would go about erecting a "wall of steel"-a network of military bases and ballistic anti-missile shields around Russia, to cut her pipeline and port links to western Europe, China and the rest of Eurasia. Halford Mackinder's worst nightmare--a cooperative convergence of mutual interests of the major states of Eurasia, born of necessity and need for oil to fuel economic growth--was emerging. Ironically, it was the blatant US grab for the vast oil riches of Iraq and, potentially, of Iran, that catalyzed closer cooperation between traditional Eurasian foes, China and Russia , and a growing realization in western Europe that their options too were narrowing. The Peak King Peak Oil theory is based on a 1956 paper done by the late Marion King Hubbert, a Texas geologist working for Shell Oil. He argued that oil wells produced in a bell curve manner, and once their "peak" was hit, inevitable decline followed. He predicted the United States oil production would peak in 1970. A modest man, he named the production curve he invented, Hubbert's Curve, and the peak as Hubbert's Peak. When US oil output began to decline in around 1970 Hubbert gained a certain fame. The only problem was, it peaked not because of resource depletion in the US fields. It "peaked" because Shell, Mobil, Texaco and the other partners of Saudi Aramco were flooding the US market with dirt cheap Middle East imports, tariff free, at prices so low California and many Texas domestic producers could not compete and were forced to shut their wells in. Vietnam success While the American oil multinationals were busy controlling the easily accessible large fields of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iran and other areas of cheap, abundant oil during the 1960's, the Russians were busy testing their alternative theory. They began drilling in a supposedly barren region of Siberia. There they developed eleven major oil fields and one Giant field based on their deep 'a-biotic' geological estimates. They drilled into crystalline basement rock and hit black gold of a scale comparable to the Alaska North Slope. They then went to Vietnam in the 1980s and offered to finance drilling costs to show their new geological theory worked. The Russian company Petrosov drilled in Vietnam's White Tiger oilfield offshore into basalt rock some 17,000 feet down and extracted 6,000 barrels a day of oil to feed the energy-starved Vietnam economy. In the USSR, a-biotic-trained Russian geologists perfected their knowledge and the USSR emerged as the world's largest oil producer by the mid-1980's. Few in the West understood why, or bothered to ask. Dr. J. F. Kenney is one of the only few Western geophysicists who has taught and worked in Russia, studying under Vladilen Krayushkin, who developed the huge Dnieper-Donets Basin. Kenney told me in a recent interview that "alone to have produced the amount of oil to date that (Saudi Arabia's) Ghawar field has produced would have required a cube of fossilized dinosaur detritus, assuming 100% conversion efficiency, measuring 19 miles deep, wide and high." In short, an absurdity. Western geologists do not bother to offer hard scientific proof of fossil origins. They merely assert as a holy truth. The Russians have produced volumes of scientific papers, most in Russian. The dominant Western journals have no interest in publishing such a revolutionary view. Careers, entire academic professions are at stake after all. Closing the door The 2003 arrest of Russian Mikhail Khodorkovsky, of Yukos Oil, took place just before he could sell a dominant stake in Yukos to ExxonMobil after a private meeting with Dick Cheney. Had Exxon got the stake they would have control of the world's largest resource of geologists and engineers trained in the a-biotic techniques of deep drilling. Since 2003 Russian scientific sharing of their knowledge has markedly lessened. Offers in the early 1990's to share their knowledge with US and other oil geophysicists were met with cold rejection according to American geophysicists involved. Why then the high-risk war to control Iraq? For a century US and allied Western oil giants have controlled world oil via control of Saudi Arabia or Kuwait or Nigeria. Today, as many giant fields are declining, the companies see the state-controlled oilfields of Iraq and Iran as the largest remaining base of cheap, easy oil. With the huge demand for oil from China and now India, it becomes a geopolitical imperative for the United States to take direct, military control of those Middle East reserves as fast as possible. Vice President Dick Cheney, came to the job from Halliburton Corp., the world's largest oil geophysical services company. The only potential threat to that US control of oil just happens to lie inside Russia and with the now-state-controlled Russian energy giants. Hmmmm. According to Kenney the Russian geophysicists used the theories of the brilliant German scientist Alfred Wegener fully 30 years before the Western geologists "discovered" Wegener in the 1960's. In 1915 Wegener published the seminal text, The Origin of Continents and Oceans, which suggested an original unified landmass or "pangaea" more than 200 million years ago which separated into present Continents by what he called Continental Drift. Up to the 1960's supposed US scientists such as Dr Frank Press, White House science advisor referred to Wegener as "lunatic." Geologists at the end of the 1960's were forced to eat their words as Wegener offered the only interpretation that allowed them to discover the vast oil resources of the North Sea. Perhaps in some decades Western geologists will rethink their mythology of fossil origins and realize what the Russians have known since the 1950's. In the meantime Moscow holds a massive energy trump card. http://oilgeopolitics.net/Geopolitics___Eurasia/Peak_Oil___Russia/peak_oil__ _russia.html The Abiotic Oil Formation Theory The abiotic oil formation theory suggests that crude oil is the result of naturally occurring and possibly ongoing geological processes. This theory was developed in the Soviet Union during the Cold War, as the Union needed to be self sufficient in terms of producing its own energy. The science behind the theory is sound and is based on experimental evidence in both the laboratory and in the field. This theory has helped to identify and therefore develop large numbers of gas and oil deposits. Examples of such fields are the South Khylchuyu field and the controversial Sakhalin II field. In its simplest form, the theory is that carbon present in the magma beneath the crust reacts with hydrogen to form methane as well as a raft of other mainly alkane <http://www.green-planet-solar-energy.com/alkane.html> hydrocarbons. The reactions are more complicated than this, with several intermediate stages. Particular mineral rocks such as granite and other silicon <http://www.green-planet-solar-energy.com/silicon-element-facts.html> based rocks act as catalysts, which speed up the reaction without actually becoming involved or consumed in the process. Experiments have shown that under extreme conditions of heat and pressure it is possible to convert iron oxide, calcium carbonate and water into methane, with hydrocarbons containing up to 10 carbon <http://www.green-planet-solar-energy.com/the-element-carbon.html> atoms being produced by Russian scientists last century and confirmed in recent US experiments. The absence of large quantities of free gaseous oxygen in the magma prevents the hydrocarbons from burning and therefore forming the lower energy state molecule carbon dioxide <http://www.green-planet-solar-energy.com/carbon-dioxide-properties.html> . The conditions present in the Earth's mantle would easily be sufficient for these small hydrocarbon chains to polymerise into the longer chain molecules found in crude oil. The abiotic oil hydrocarbons formed are under incredible pressure. They then will move toward lower pressure areas if possible. This is generally toward the surface through cracks, or fissures, in the basement granite of the crust. Such breaks in the crust are thought to result from meteor impacts. They build up in areas where the layer of rock above them is non porous, in the same manner proposed for fossil fuel formation of oil <http://www.green-planet-solar-energy.com/fossil-fuel-formation.html> . Russian test drilling in areas of known impact sites has been very productive. Application of the abiotic oil theory has helped Russia to not only meet its own energy needs but also become one of the world's largest exporters of petroleum. Self Replenishing Oil Wells If correct, the abiotic oil theory means that petroleum sources are probably not as limited as currently thought and may indeed be in plentiful supply. It is also likely that since removing the oil in reservoirs reduces the pressure in that area, further seepage of oil from the mantle to that part of the crust is more likely. The equilibrium law of chemical reactions also predicts that this removal of petroleum from close to the mantle will encourage further production. While is is not known what speed this oil production is occurring at in the mantle of the planet, it is possible that the rate is high which could account for some oil wells refilling to some degree several years after being capped and abandoned. One outstanding example of this is the underwater drilling site called Eugene Island in the Gulf of Mexico. Production from this site dropped off from 3200 tonnes per day in 1989 to 2400 tonnes per day in 1992 as predicted by standard models, but then in 1996 the amount of oil being recovered from the deposit surged to 4800 tonnes per day, instigating a reassessment of the size of this oil body. Since that time production has again slowly diminished. Life In The Crust Of The Earth One major point that detractors of this theory make is that oil contains bio-markers, which are the remains of dead organisms such as bacteria and diatoms. Thermophilic, or heat loving, bacteria have been found living in rocks far down in the Earth's crust, close to the molten mantle. It is not difficult to envisage these bacteria living anaerobically on a ready supply of high energy hydrocarbons seeping continually upward from hot rock below. This could certainly result in organic material being present in oil that formed abiotically, though this is speculation. Hydrocarbons In Space Hydrocarbons have been proven to exist elsewhere in the solar system. Titan moon <http://www.green-planet-solar-energy.com/titan-moon.html> , which orbits Saturn, is saturated with them. Its atmosphere, surface liquid and and even sand dunes are made from hydrocarbons. While the moon is considerably smaller than Earth it is estimated to possess many thousands of times the oil reserves of Earth on the surface alone. NASA has found no evidence of past or present life on this moon so it can only be assumed that these hydrocarbons were generated by a means other than the fossilization of organic remains. A New Theory Is Needed There are detractors for both the biotic oil theory and the fossil theory, and both make valid arguments. It is most likely that oil is produced by both mechanisms and also possibly as a waste product of deep living bacteria. However, no one theory can account for all the phenomena associated with oil finds. There are deposits of oil that seem to support both the abiotic oil and the fossil oil theories. Energy Use, Oil and Plastics Regardless of whether oil is a renewable resource or not, we still need to be very careful about how we use it. The economic implications of oil being a renewable resource are massive and generally provide a more positive outlook for the world in the short term. This does not change the facts that our current excessive production of Carbon Dioxide <http://www.green-planet-solar-energy.com/carbon-dioxide-properties.html> needs to be addressed. Clearly there is still a pressing need for the large scale implementation and ongoing development of clean energy such as solar power and wind power. If the abiotic oil theory holds true then only the immediate energy crisis is resolved. The need for serious immediate action on greenhouse emissions still stands as the greatest challenge of the 21st century. http://www.green-planet-solar-energy.com/abiotic-oil.html _____
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