-ak- wrote: March 1, 2005 ``I see the price of oil has gone over fifty-one dollars a barrel recently and the faith in the Dollar further eroded internationally ...
About a year or more ago in the Chemical & Engineering News ... The U.S. economy was unsettled, and there was talk about the supply of fuel (mid east oil) reserves SHRINKING ... The other article was about the increasing investments and development of the tremendous natural gas field discovered in Quatar. The investments are to develop a Gas to Liquid (GTL) technology which converts natural gas to a clear liquid fuel that can/is be used in unmodified diesel engines. Europe uses diesel engines in half of their vehicles. The U.S. uses less than two percent. Diesels give 30% better mileage than gas, and GTL fuel burns cleaner ... The GTL process is basically the 1933 Fischer-Tropsch process (CO) and/or the 1912 Bergius process (coal). Catalysts used are not only Cobalt but also Nickel. And the clear fuel produced (among many) is: Kerosene. Diesel engines do burn kerosene I understand. Perhaps cold fusion or nuclear power could provide the needed recycling heat energy needs. Of course the are OTHER GREENHOUSE GASSES TO WORRY ABOUT but CO2 "remediation" is the major concern ...'' [Jack's caps] Hi All, As you know, methanol is my favorite approach for breaking loose from the talons of terrorism, but kerosene would work just as well. The following article indicates that methane would be an almost unlimited source for either fuel. The article also indicates that there is enough methane for periodic "eruptions" sufficient to trigger interglacials: Jack Smith --------------------- ARTICLE from Harvard Magazine, March-April, 2005, By Erin O'Donnell http://www.harvardmagazine.com/on-line/030573.html Hydrocarbon Heresy: Rocks into Gas [The cell employs two diamonds, each about three millimeters (roughly one-eighth-inch) high, which sit with their tips facing each other in hardened precision frames that are forced together, creating intense pressure in the small space between the tips. They compress a small metal plate that holds the sample. The device can generate pressures greater than those in the center of the earth (3.6 million atmospheres) The methane generation experiments use pressures in the 50-100,000 atmosphere range, corresponding to the earth's upper mantle.] ``Geologists have long believed that the world's supply of oil and natural gas came from the decay of primordial plant and animal matter, which, over the course of millions of years, turned into petroleum. But new research coauthored by Dudley Herschbach, Baird research professor of science and recipient of the 1986 Nobel Prize in chemistry, questions that thinking. Published last fall in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the study describes how investigators combined three abiotic (non-living) materials -- water (H2O), limestone (CaCO3), and iron oxide (FeO) -- and crushed the mixture together with the same intense pressure found deep below the earth's surface. This process created methane (CH4), the major component of natural gas. Herschbach says this offers evidence, although as yet far from proof, for a maverick theory that much of the world's supply of so-called fossil fuels may not derive from the decay of dinosaur-era organisms after all. Herschbach became interested in the origins of petroleum hydrocarbons while reading A Well-Ordered Thing, a book about the nineteenth-century Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleev, who developed the periodic table. Written by Michael Gordin '96, Ph.D. '01, a current Junior Fellow, the book mentions a theory long held by Russian and Ukrainian geologists: that petroleum comes from reactions of water with other abiotic materials, and then bubbles up toward the earth's surface. Intrigued, Herschbach read further, including The Deep, Hot Bio-sphere by the late Cornell astrophysicist Thomas Gold. An iconoclast, Gold saw merit in the Russian and Ukrainian view that petroleum has nonliving origins. He theorized that organic materials found in oil -- which most scientists took as a sign that petroleum comes from living things -- may simply be waste matter from microbial organisms that feed on the hydrocarbons generated deep in the earth as these flow upward ... The diamond anvil cell, developed at the Carnegie Institution, can create the same pressures found as far as 4,000 miles beneath the earth's surface ... Diamonds are an ideal material for such experiments, Herschbach explains. As one of the hardest substances on earth, they can withstand the tremendous force, and because they're transparent, scientists can use beams of light and X-rays to identify what's inside the cell without pulling the diamonds apart ... "The experiment showed it's easy to make methane," Herschbach says. The new findings may serve to corroborate other evidence, cited by Gold, that some of the earth's reservoirs of oil appear to refill as they're pumped out, suggesting that petroleum may be continually generated. This could have broad implications for petroleum production and consumption, and for our planet's ecology and economy ...''
