New evidence supports 19th century idea on formation of oil and gas

American Chemical Society ^ | Nov 4, 2009 | Unknown

[decimon]

Scientists in Washington, D.C. are reporting laboratory evidence supporting the possibility that some of Earth's oil and natural gas may have formed in a way much different than the traditional process described in science textbooks.

Their study is scheduled for Nov./Dec. issue of ACS' Energy & Fuels, a bi-monthly publication. Anurag Sharma and colleagues note that the traditional process involves biology: Prehistoric plants died and changed into oil and gas while sandwiched between layers of rock in the hot, high-pressure environment deep below Earth's surface. Some scientists, however, believe that oil and gas originated in other ways, including chemical reactions between carbon dioxide and hydrogen below Earth' surface.

The new study describes a test of that idea, which dates to at least 1877 and famous Russian chemist Dimitri Mendeelev. They combined ingredients for this so-called abiotic synthesis of methane, the main ingredient in natural gas, in a diamond-anvil cell and monitored in-situ the progress of the reaction. The diamond anvils can generate high pressures and temperatures similar to those that occur deep below Earth's surface and allow for in-situ optical spectroscopy at the extreme environments. The results "strongly suggest" that some methane could form strictly from chemical reactions in a variety of chemical environments. This study further highlights the role of reaction pathways and fluid immiscibility in the extent of hydrocarbon formation at extreme conditions simulating deep subsurface.

###

ARTICLE FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE "In Situ Diamond-Anvil Cell Observations of Methanogenesis at High Pressures and Temperatures"

DOWNLOAD FULL TEXT ARTICLE http://pubs.acs.org/stoken/presspac/presspac/full/10.1021/ef9006017

CONTACT: Anurag Sharma, Ph.D. Geophysical Laboratory Carnegie Institution of Washington Washington, D.C. 20015 Phone: 202-478-7975 Fax: 202-478-8901 Email: asharma@ciw.edu

[decimon]

Past gas ping.

[HerrBlucher]

An endless supply of oil and gas would really piss off liberals. I sure hope its true.

[RoadGumby]

Ruh roh raggy. You mean oil might not be biologically produced? might not be millions of years old? Might even be self-replenishing as a natural earth product? Thank You Lord for a wonderful source of energy from a bountiful planet.

[Psalm 73]

"Some scientists, however, believe that oil and gas originated in other ways, including chemical reactions between carbon dioxide and hydrogen below Earth' surface."

I've always thought that's a heck of a lot of petroleum to be formed from plants.
Coal perhaps, but not gazzillions of barrels of oil.

[decimon]

You mean oil might not be biologically produced?

One thing need not preclude another.

[mountn man]

When an oil field is 5 miles below the surface of the earth, 1000's of feet in depth and miles across, thats an AWFUL LOT of trees and animals to be packed into an area. Why is the oil pocket 5 miles down? Was the earth at one time a lot smaller, that what is 5 miles down, was once the surface of the earth. When plants and animals die, they decompose into dust and dirt. What prevented normal decomposition, that allowed heat and pressure to do its thingy versus decomposition?

If you'd take the Amazon forest and INSTANTLY covered it, crushed it, and heated it, the trees and plants and animals would crush down to about a foot thick, not 1000's of feet.

I've read that oil wells, once thought dried up, are once again filling up with oil. Suggesting that oil creation might be a recurring process.

[Ingtar]

Jupiter’s atmosphere is composed of about 90% hydrogen and 10 % helium. There are only minute traces (0.07%) of methane (CH3), water, ammonia, and rock dust.

Since methane was one of those “biotic” materials under discussion, either there is life on Jupiter or methane is abiotic.

[American Constitutionalist]

A constant reminder that methane is produced daily.
God would not have put gas, oil, coal in the earth if he didn't intend for us to use it in productive ways.
God is a God of creating and producing.
As long as we use it in a way that is being good stewards of the earth.

[American Constitutionalist]

Could we use the outer gases planets as space gas stations to go farther out into space ?

[gigster]

I’ve always-since I heard of it-been a proponent of the Mendeleev Theory.

Another little-known fact is his work with Vodka, and his discovery of the “Three-Martini Lunch”.

[Ingtar]

I think oxygen would be a major requirement as far as fuel goes. I don’t recall seeing oxygen on the list of gases found “out there.”

[ChessExpert]

As a topic, this is almost like evolution, as some people insist upon the dogma they received in High school. To these people, you MUST believe. As with climate change and evolution, we are told that the science is settled and that there is the science side and the anti-science side. This is all hogwash because the scientific process involves thinking for oneself and the generation of multiple, often mutually exclusive, hypotheses.

I don't know the scientific arguments for biotic or abiotic origins for oil, gas, and coal. It doesn't seem to me that this would be an easy topic to resolve. If the origin in biological, one would expect to find remains of clearly biological origin, but perhaps heat and pressure could eradicate the evidence. If the origin is not biological, some biological “contamination” might still have occurred. Perhaps the “science” on this would still focus on the prevalence or relative absence of biological material, and the use of judgment.

The idea that our oil, gas and coal have a biological origin suggests to some that “we will run out.” Even that claim is not certain. A “finite” amount can still be a whole lot. In the Carter years the EPA did a study that concluded that, with a modest increase in price, there would be enough natural gas to last a few thousand years. That's finite, certainly not infinite, but still a lot.

Has anyone estimated how much oil, gas and coal should exist based upon the premise of biological origins? Maybe we have pumped more oil than should exist. Perhaps known discoveries of coal are more than should exist.

[thackney]

Forming methane, a known naturally occurring material found on multiple planets, is a far different than long string hydrocarbons found in oil.

It will be good to read it once it comes out, thanks for the ping.

[Amos the Prophet]

Once again environmentalism is shown to be little more than hysteria combined with contempt for the human species. Put under extreme pressure these attitudes create liberalism, a toxic waste of no known use.

[bvw]

Makes sense.

[hennie pennie]

Interesting!

[BertWheeler]

I certainly don’t think that today’s oil is the result of prehistoric dinasaurs and plants - no friggin’ way!

The Earth produces oil the way the human body produces sweat. The ocean floor is constantly emitting oil.

Fossil fuels, the concept behind it, is not workable in today’s world. We know it isn’t.

[GreyFriar]

H’mmm is this saying that the dinosaur’s didn’t die for our internal combustion engines?

[RobRoy]

I first heard of this abiotic thing from a guy named Thomas Gold.

It isn’t fully vetted yet, and there are some explanations for it, but the fact is that some capped wells, when uncapped, show an increase - sometimes significant - of oil, compared to when they were originally capped.

[Mmogamer]

Look at whats on Titan: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lakes_of_Titan

[Little Pig]

Google “oxygen cloud space”. There are lots of supernova remnants “out there” with substantial oxygen components.

[thackney]

Interesting that the Abstract for the actual article (already available on-line) only mentions methane generation.

Only in the EurekaAlert is this hyped to imply that also means oil.

[Hoosier-Daddy]

What oxygen in methane? We know CO2 exists below ground (Evian).

[thackney]

Forgot the link

http://pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10.1021/ef9006017

[Mmogamer]

And btw is titan has seas and massive reserves of hydrocarbons, if there is oil/gas/ etc there.. well no plant life made it for sure.

[Ingtar]

He was asking about refueling space ships. All of the options that I can think of include oxygen in order to burn the fuel.

[thackney]

Methane is not the same as the long-string complex hydrocarbons found in oil.

[Sherman Logan]

There is a spectrum of fuels from peat to various types of brown coal, to bituminous coals to anthracite.

It appears pretty clearly that the harder and more energy-containing types are formed from peat by the action of heat and pressure underground.

As far as animals and plants being unable to form thick deposits, there are numerous layers of limestone around the world hundreds of feet thick. It is pretty clear that limestone is primarily formed from the shells of marine organisms.

[beefree]

I believe oil is a gift from God and that is why the left attempts to demonize it. They worship the creation instead of the Creator.

[PBinTX]

Oil doesn’t exist as a lake below ground, so your example about crushing down the rainforest is flawed. Oil occurs in the pore spaces of rocks like sandstone and there may only be 20 to 30% porosity for the oil to occupy, like water in a sponge. You can get a thousand feet of oil because the oil is trapped by a structural or lithologic trap, pooling oil in a limited space that drained from a much larger area. A thousand feet of oil saturated rock is not unusual.

[El Laton Caliente]

The Russians have not tought oil was “fossel” fuel, but a mineral. We have had oil fields in Oklahoma and the Gulf of Mexico REFILL with oil in recent years. Almost ALL oil fields seem to last much longer than the original surveys indicate.

Why?

Oil is seeping up from the earth’s core. It has been there since the earth formed.

Hydrogen is the most common element in the universe. Carbon is a direct product of fusion in stars. The first generation star explodes and sends it’s contents out to form other stars and planets. A plant’s molten core supplies the heat and pressure to form hydrocarbon chains. Then pressure forces the gasious oil up through the crust until it cools and condenses into oil pockets. The lighter hydrocarbon chains become natural gas pockets.

So is it really renewable? I think the answer is sort of... Oil will last much longer than first thought, but will deminish over time. Earth will only produce at it’s own rate and we could use it up faster than it is renewed.

Then there is an entire moon of Jupiter covered by oceans of methane we could process into fuel...

[zot]

H’mmm is this saying that the dinosaur’s didn’t die for our internal combustion engines?

Yep -- the earth is a pressure-cooker that continues to make oil out of hydrogen and carbon.

[El Laton Caliente]

There is lots of water out there that can be processed into oxygen.

[El Laton Caliente]

Not millions, but billions of years. The carbon was made by first generation stars through fusion. They went supernova and supplied the material the second generation stars and planets were made from.

They hydrogen and carbon have been in the earth’s core since it formed about 3 billion years ago...

[Little Ray]

Does this mean we can inject carbon or CO2 into oil fields to make MORE oil?

[decimon]

Does this mean we can inject carbon or CO2 into oil fields to make MORE oil?

You can inject what chemical compounds it would take but you wouldn't have the required heat, pressure and time.

[Ann Archy]

I have always thought oil was produced by PRESSURE and it either squeezed out the oil in the rocks or else melted the rocks into oil.

How anyone believes it's plants and animals......MOSTLY IN A FEW PLACES on earth....is beyond me. I have had geologists wanting to COMMIT me for this!!

[mountn man]

Ok, about limestone, I can see shells building up, under water over time. But plant and animal life, building up over time? What prevented the previous material from decompossing? Limestone would have had to have been on a sea floor at one time. Meanwhile plant and animal life on the surface, and then in a large pocket, taken miles below the surface, undisturbed, where the processes would have crushed the volume to a fraction of the size.

Which means if a oil deposit were the size of, lets say Manhattan, and was 1000 ft deep, it would have had to have been 10,000 feet deep, or more, with plant and animal carcasses, preserved, encapsulated, and then crushed to its current size, and then pressurized and heated, to produce crude.

Now a tree that dies, the root system underground decays in about 50 years, or less. Somehow that decay has to be stopped, in order for 100's or 1000's of feet of plant and animal material to be deposited. Then it all has to be encapsulated together. Then taken 1000's and 1000's of feet below ground. Where over millenia, heat and pressure do their thing.

Mess up one of the processes and it would wipe out the entire production. Unless of course there was even more material that was part of this process, that never was changed over, and what we have is just a small fraction of what "could have been". Meaning that either the initial material was the size of Manhattan and 100,000 ft deep. Or it was the size of New York state 10,000 ft deep. Or it was the entire eastern half of the US, from the Mississippi to Atlantic, 100 feet deep.

Now add up ALL the oil pockets in the world, and figure how much material it would take to produce that. Plus coal and peat.

I don't know, seems kinda a push to think that ALL the crude came from plants and animals.

I mean if we were able to take all the vegetation and animal life on earth, push it into the Grand Canyon, bury it, pressurize it, and heat it, how full would the Grand Canyon be with oil? Now do that REPEATEDLY for EVERY single deposit.

How do you get vegetation to all gather in one spot and not decay. When plants die they decompose and provide nutrients for new plants. Now you have to get MASS animal congrigation, in one spot, then suddenly die, and not decompose, and become encapsulated, along with all the vegetable material.

So that happens in Texas, then Pennsylvania, then Michigan, then Alaska, then Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Indonesia, and all the ocean reserves.

[thackney]

You need to remember that heat and pressure BREAK DOWN the complex hydrocarbons found in oil into shorter, simpler molecules. We do this in refineries every day.

If you have a basic understanding of enthalpy and entropy, this will help explain:
http://www.chemcases.com/fuels/fuels-b.htm

[Sherman Logan]

Don’t claim to have all the answers, but we probably have the early stages of coal and possibly oil/gas production going on right now in peat bogs around the world. Here’s the Wiki entry for peat.
http://74.125.113.132/search?q=cache:5M4ai7XvIEgJ:en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peat+peat&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us

We’re talking very large volumes.

I am fully open to the idea of abiotic production of natural gas and somewhat less so to oil. Coal it seems pretty clear is fossil in origin.

[mountn man]

Problem is, whether in pools or suspended in the pores of rock, oil still has volume. Billions of barrels of oil, still require trillions of barrels of volume of mass, to be crushed, pressurized and percolated.

With each multi billion barrel oil reserve, it would take multi trillion barrels of organic life to produce.

So how many hundreds of oil deposits have billions of barrels of oil, that originally came from a trillion barrels of organic mass?

And how many times would sudden life ending/changing events have had to happen to make JUST THESE possible?

What about the organic material that was lost? What are the possibilities that each deposit is made up of the majority of the organic material at the time? Wouldn't it be more plausible that the organic material now called oil, is just a small fraction of the organic material at the time of encapsulation? Meaning there was much greater amount of organic material to begin with, that never got changed, but simply decayed.

[decimon]

Both the organic and discreet chemical processes described in the article require high pressures and heat to produce oil.

[mountn man]

Coal, by itself I could accept. But when you add the mass of vegetation required for coal, gas, peat, oil, and anything else, I have a hard time grasping All the SUDDEN trappings of organic life, in such large quantities, at so many different times.

[mountn man]

Problem is, its not in a few places. Its in quite a number of places. Meaning the trappings of large numbers of plants and animals, SUDDENLY, has happened numerous times.

[thackney]

But the article only talks about the formation of Methane based on starting with CO₂ and H₂. It does not discuss forming the long-chain (higher-energy) molecules found in oil. It is an important distinction.

[wolf78]

When an oil field is 5 miles below the surface of the earth, 1000's of feet in depth and miles across, thats an AWFUL LOT of trees and animals to be packed into an area.

Except coal is from forests, oil is from oceans, i.e. plankton.

When plants and animals die, they decompose into dust and dirt. What prevented normal decomposition, that allowed heat and pressure to do its thingy versus decomposition?

Hogwash. Dust and dirt, i.e. the mineral content is just a few percent. Most is carbon, oxygen and hydrogen. Hydrogen and oxygen evaporate partly as water, carbon together with hydrogen and oxygen is consumed by other animals and plants (ever heard of carbs?), turned into CO2, which together with the water nourishes new plant life. If you now take the biomass, remove it from the circle of life, heat and pressurize it, you get hydrocarbons like crude oil and natural gas (fossil) or synthetic biomass-to-liquid fuels (industrial).

What isolates the biomass from the natural recycling process is twofold: In the case of forests and moors it's a continuous process, some biomass is always lost to the ground. In the case of ocean plankton it's the deep sea environment with high pressure and low oxygen.

If you'd take the Amazon forest and INSTANTLY covered it, crushed it, and heated it, the trees and plants and animals would crush down to about a foot thick, not 1000's of feet.

If you repeat the cycle for hundreds of thousands / millions of years, you only need a few milimeters (not even a foot) per year to get to the amount of oil there is today.

If the origin in biological, one would expect to find remains of clearly biological origin, but perhaps heat and pressure could eradicate the evidence. If the origin is not biological, some biological “contamination” might still have occurred. Perhaps the “science” on this would still focus on the prevalence or relative absence of biological material, and the use of judgment.

That science has been done decades ago. The composition of petroleum, especially of trace elements contained in the petroleum like sulfur etc. strongly suggests a biological origin. Also the location of oil fields relative to the historic location of oceans suggests a biological origin. That doesn't mean that abiotic hydrocarbons don't exist. It just means that large-scale abiotic generation of petroleum is very, very unlikely.

Sherman Logan is a 100% correct.

[SunkenCiv]

Thanks hennie pennie. Thomas Gold ping. Thanks decimon for posting the topic.

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[R W Reactionairy]

There is much more coal than oil in terms of stored energy.

The processes for abiotic natural gas appear a lot more likely than for abiotic oil.

Finally, it does not make much difference how it is made. In addition to oil you still need a large enough trap [cap rock to keep it from rising — and something to keep it from migrating further horizontally] and suitable reservoir rock [porous and permiable] at a depth no so deep as to cook down the oil to have an economically viable deposit.

[R W Reactionairy]

The oil shales [actually kerogen in marlstones mostly — or so I have been told] of the Green River three corners area of Colorado, Wyoming and Utah are an oil deposit in the making. These shales would need to be burried more deeply to cook down the kerogen; sealed off from migrating to the surface and then accumulate in a trap .... and voila, an oilfield.

For most oil deposits, geologists can identify with someconviction [perhaps incorrectly but with conviction] the source rocks for the oil.