Posted on 09/14/2004 4:51:19 PM PDT by ProtectOurFreedom
..thats' what I remembered.
I'd like to recommend to all freebers Prof. Gold's book 'The Deep Hot Biosphere'. It was a very interesting book.
In the book, he mentions drilling on both the Canadian and Swedish granite shield formations. I remember reading the comment about 80 barrels of oil from one, I can't remember the result of the other. Unfortunately, I can't put my finger on the book. I have a tendency to loan the books I love.
My apologies to all.
...and Halliburton helped them. Everybody knows.
This paragraph exhibits some strange assumptions. First, there wasn't "more" drilling in the Swedish Silurian Ring experiment. The oil was found during the experiment.
It's possible that the TV show I saw was filmed before drilling was complete althought this was not implied in the show as I recall. I tried to find records of this show (probably PBS) online, but evidently it is too old. Another poster seems to remember it as I did though. (See #41)
Second, Gold's assertions are not "hearsay" and I wonder why you would use such a loaded term. This was Gold's experiment. Gold was there. Gold saw the oil. Gold analyzed the samples. What is hearsay about that?
In your prior post you quoted a Wired Magazine interview with Gold where he claimed to have found oil. If you tell me that Gold found oil because he said he did, that is hearsay. Naturally I would probably accept the word of a responsible person like Gold and also yourself, but I thought it would be good to also hear some reports from other people involved in the drilling or some scientific reports as to what was seen and discovered and how it was intepreted, before I changed my whole worldview about abiogenic oil..
Thanks for letting me know about this. I guess "hearsay" is a "loaded" word, but that is not how I intended it. I'm just not good at selecting words.
I didn't mean to come off as accusatory. But the meaning of hearsay is NOT what you apparently believe. Hearsay is the passing on of information you have "heard" from others, and certainly does not include knowledge gained from personal experience.
You mentioned "hearsay from Gold".
So, actually, it WAS hearsay from ME - but not from Gold. That's why I linked you to Gold's interview. In the interview, you are hearing it "from the horse's mouth" - that's not hearsay. That's direct. Also, I linked to a 36 page scientific paper by Gold that is also not hearsay.
I accept your explanation that you had inadvertently used the wrong expression.
Actually you would have been ok if you had applied the term hearsay to me instead of to Gold, as all I am doing is passing along what I had "heard" or learned from the sources I have directed you to.
These cretins don't understand science or economics. No one really knows how much oil reserve there are, it's pure speculation. Ever single prediction over the years has been dead wrong. As far as running out is concerned...we will never run out. Long before we pump the last barrel out of the earth oil will have become gradually more and more expensive to find and pump. This will cause a long term increase in the cost of oil products which will stimulate the development of alternative forms of energy. The last thing we should be doing is investing money in alternative energies that cost more than our current forms of energy.
Couldn't agree more, Casloy. I was involved in clean coal research in the early and mid 1980s. Our work was funded by utility companies (a few 10s of millions of dollars) but the federal government spent BILLIONS of dollars on the technology. Most of it was technically successful, but an economic disaster. A lot of it was predicated on the depletion of oil reserves necessitating the conversion of coal to liquid and gas fuels. I became convinced that technology really doesn't take that long to develop and we are better off waiting until reserves are gradually depleted before developing the technology. This makes much more economic sense than developing the technology decades in advance, putting it on the shelf, and having all the critical expertise retire and die before the technology is needed.
I have always been skeptical that there were enough dead dinosaurs and dead plants to supply us with so much oil.
There used to be a scientific report on the web evaluating Gold's theory and the oil he found in the Silurian Ring well. The government of Sweden commissioned the report in hopes, I think, of finding a viable energy source for their country. They paid some professional geochemists, geologists, and others to do the report as I remember.
The report concluded that the hydrocarbons found in the well could be correlated to nearby shale formations, the normal source beds for oil in conventional theory. The report gave the concentrations of some C27, C28, and C29 steranes normally used for source correlation. The ratios of these compounds in the "oil" found in Gold's well correlated fairly well with the same ratios in shale hydrocarbons. Very likely that is where the hydrocarbons came from, perhaps from overlying shale blasted into the meteor crater by the meteor.
Gold's theory that hydrocarbons came from below turned conventional theory on its head. Conventional theory says that organic matter is deposited in fine, clay-rich sediment (shale) and breaks down over geologic time and deep hot burial to form oil. If the organic material is buried at elevated temperatures long enough it will break down even further into smaller molecules, i.e., natural gas.
Gold's theory says that hydrocarbons like methane seep up from below and are transformed into heavier molecules as they go upwards, perhaps by microorganisms working on the methane.
A number of the compounds in oils have been tied back to their molecular precursors. Paraffins, for example, are the remnants of chlorophylls. The compound oleanane is a remnant of something formed in flowering plants, and thus is found in oils that formed from organic matter deposited after flowering plants developed. Other compounds can be tied to cell walls of plants, etc.
I think Gold's theory would have a hard time explaining these molecular fossils. Maybe he argues that the oil coming up from the deep strips these molecular biomarker compounds out of the formations they pass through. I gather that that is not a very satisfactory explanation for geochemists though.
Certainly if there had been any real success from the Silurian well and had the well found a viable energy source, some Swedish politicians, being politicians, would have claimed success and crowed to the world about it. Sweden would have started drilling a whole series of additional wells to tap the oil and achieve energy independence. If so, they've kept very quiet about it.
As far as I know, Gold's theory is pretty much discounted by the petroleum industry and petroleum geochemists.
That would certainly be true of US trained petroleum geologists. New ideas are ususally rejected by the old hands when they don't match what people "know". But that's not true in Russia, for example, where these ideas have been an accepted part of their body of knowledge for years.
As for oil in the Silurian ring, Gold doesn't think that the oil found at a depth of 6 km came from nearby shales, and he as a number of very plausible reasosn for think =ing so.
The Swedish government's reaction to finding only "small" amounts of oil at depth in the Silurian ring are like someone breaking into an old, previously unknown, sealed, Egyptian crypt and finding a computer keyboard - then complaining that it sure isn't doesn't mean much without the computer.
"Environmental groups reacted warily to the news. Kert Davies of Greenpeace USA in Washington stressed the last thing the world needs is an even more abundant source of "global warming" gases than are already being burned in the world's cars and factories."
Someone answer me this. Who screamed first and the loudest when the lights went out in California in 91?
That would certainly be true of US trained petroleum geologists. New ideas are ususally rejected by the old hands when they don't match what people "know". But that's not true in Russia, for example, where these ideas have been an accepted part of their body of knowledge for years.
You are entitled to your opinion, of course. I worked for many years for one of the world's top private industry petroleum research labs. The lab offered incentives for people to come up with novel ways of looking at things. They weren't close minded at all.
I must admit that I don't have a very high opinion of the Russian scientific papers I've read. It has been a few years, but it was pretty shoddy, poorly written stuff. On the other hand, I suspect that Russian math work is first rate. I cited some of their math in one of my own papers.
Gold does not ignore the steranes, but insists that they come from subterranean bacteria (hopanes, as I recall).
This is elaborated on in some detail in his book, "The Deep Hot Biosphere".
This reference is one he mentions relative to bacteria in the Silurian Ring oils:
*Dr. U. Szewzyk at the National Bacteriological Laboratory (Sweden) has cultured several strains of anaerobic, thermophilic bacteria from samples taken below 4,000 m in the Gravberg borehole , Siljan Ring, Central Sweden. Personal communication. Also Dr. K. Pedersen at the Department of Marine Biology of the University of Göteborg, reports: "Deep ground water microbiology in Swedish granitic rock" (15).
One other thing. I am not a person who can validate or invalidate Gold's work or his opinions. Nor yours. I am even less than an amateur. I am a bystander, basically.
I'd like it to be true that we don't have an impending catastrophic collapse of petrolueum production. I don't think we will.
Gold beleives that the oil in the shale near the Silurian ring came from deep sources, not the other way round, and the steranes correlate because of that. He makes this point explicitly in the paper I referenced and linked a few post back up the thread.
I'm not a geochemist myself, but I have worked with them, supervised them, published papers with them, and picked up an informed smattering of what they do.
In a lab I once supervised, we duplicated oil generation from the organic matter in shales with heat and pressure. Lots of labs have done that -- it's standard stuff. Has Gold demonstrated his concept for oil generation in the lab or is it only conjecture on his part?
I think in part the oil generation question is an Occam's Razor type of question. There is a simple explanation for oil generation staring us in the face (conventional theory) and Gold comes up with a different theory. More power to him, but I think he's yet to prove his case.
I do think we are running out of easily recoverable oil. Sometime in the next ten years or so, conventional oil production will cease to meet demand and the price will shoot up. The higher price will make more expensive sources of energy viable, such as heavy oil from oil sands and oil shale.
It won't be an easy transition. Hold on to your oil company stocks.
The thought of all this global heating makes me want to grab my favorite CO 2 enhanced beverage and release it with a loud salute to the atmosphere.
Actually, I think Ockham would have to side with Gold.
When you look around the solar system, you find hydrocarbons in huge abundance, mostly as methane ices.
There is no reason to assume that the building blocks of stuff that accreted to form the earth in its early days were not largely composed of materials with lots of hydrocarbons. Gold also makes a compelling and actually simple case to explain why they are largely still here. He also has a lot of experimental data that tends to support his views. Without much of anything in the way of fudge factors that would cause problems for William of Ockham.
Is Gold's case proven? Not by a long shot, but it can't simply be swept away, either. Some of his corollary theories are pretty weak, but the basic one about the presence of deep entrapped abiogenic hydrocarbons is pretty persuasive.
Bringing Ockam back into the debate for a moment, which hypothesis requires fewer building blocks: That material we know to be abundant through the solar system where we don't find life is also abundant here on the Earth, or that somehow the Earth was deprived of these materials, but then created it's own by the accumulation and biogenic processing of stupendous quantities of organic materials derived from living organisms.
By the way, the quantities don't match up very well, either. The amount of known petroleum, natural gas and coal far exceeds what can be calculated as biological remnant material. Here we have another problem for Ockham's Razor, for we have to add in another fudge factor to try to account for this disconnect between reality and theory.
Hopefully, in time, research and further discoveries will provide some definitive answers.
Let's look for a minute at what happens to hydrocarbons we find in some of the hottest, deepest wells. They are largely carbon with the hydrogen burned off. At least that is how they've been described to me by others in our company. How would Gold explain that?
At some point the temperature is high enough to destroy the chemical bonds of methane. You can see the same effect to a lesser degree in the types and amounts of side chains in polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAH) in soots. In low temperature soots the PAH that have methyl side groups are more abundant than those without. In high temperature soots, the parent PAH (the one without side methyl groups) is most abundant. The high temperatures knock the side chains off.
As coal beds are exposed to long hot burial, the amount of PAH and other high molecular weight compounds decreases. The high temperature motion of molecules breaks them apart. Keep up the burial and the coal bed becomes natural coke or graphite. It has lost the hydrogen it once had. That's what you find near volcanic intrusions. How would Gold explain that?
Side issue. You reminded me that Occam's razor can indeed be spelled Ockham's razor. See for example: Wikipedia entry for Occam's razor.
The Occam spelling in 'Occam's razor' has 49,800 hits in Google compared to 36,900 hits for the 'Ockham's razor' spelling. Not that Google is a real arbiter of the correct spelling, but perhaps it is an indicator of most frequent usage. 'William of Occam' has only 6,290 hits while 'William of Ockham' has 15,100. I noticed in one of the articles about him that William of Ockham fled to Germany at one point in his life and streets in Munich are spelled Occam in his honor. Perhaps it is the German spelling of Occam's razor that has become most prevalent in usage.
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