Posted on 11/19/2001 10:07:24 AM PST by Aurelius
SCIENTIST STIRS THE CAULDRON: OIL, HE SAYS, IS RENEWABLE
David L. Chandler,
Globe staff Date: May 22, 2001 Page: A14 Section: Health Science
It's as basic as the terminology people use in discussing sources of energy: On the one hand, there are "fossil fuels," left over from the decayed remains of millions of years worth of vegetation and destined to run out before long; on the other hand, there are "renewable" resources that could sustain human activities indefinitely.
But what if fossil fuels aren't fossils, but are actually renewable and virtually inexhaustible? To most people, that question may sound as reasonable as asking what if down were up, or the XFL were a big, classy hit. But a handful of scientists, led by the unconventional and always-controversial astronomer Thomas Gold of Cornell University, state just that. Move over, dinosaurs, they say: Petroleum has as much to do with fossils as the moon has to do with green cheese.
Gold's claim, spelled out in a book just out in paperback as well as a talk at the Harvard Coop last week, challenges basic premises of the energy debate, from environmentalists' warning of oil's eventual decline to President George W. Bush's current talk about an energy shortage. Just dig deep enough, Gold says, and almost anyone can strike oil.
As one might expect, most mainstream petroleum geologists view this contrarian point of view with either scorn and derision, or the studied indifference reserved for flat-Earthers.
"We're very familiar with Tommy Gold," said Larry Nation, a spokesman for the American Association of Petroleum Geologists. Geologists in that field, he said, "are more open-minded than you might think. They're a pretty independent bunch, or there wouldn't be so many dry holes." But most of them draw the line at Gold's theory.
At least one successful natural gas geologist, though, has sided with Gold's unorthodox concept, which, in essence, goes like this: Far from being the product of decayed vegetation, petroleum is being manufactured constantly in the Earth's crust. It is made from methane, or natural gas, the simplest of all the hydrocarbon fuels, as it bubbles upward from the depths of the Earth where it has existed since the planet's formation more than 4 billion years ago.
As it rises, the methane is consumed by billions of microbes that exist in a dark netherworld where sunlight never penetrates. While all surface life depends on sunlight, this deep, hidden realm of life - dubbed by Gold as "The Deep Hot Biosphere," which is also the title of his book on the subject - lives on the chemical energy of the methane itself. The biological traces found in all petroleum, he argues, is derived from this hidden form of life, not from the decayed plants usually thought to be petroleum's source.
If Gold's theory is right, then the Earth's "reserves" of petroleum and natural gas may be hundreds of times greater than most geologists now believe. Oil wells that are pumped dry will simply refill themselves as more methane and petroleum works its way upward to fill the emptied spaces in the rock. This has already happened in a few places, geologists agree - something that is hard to explain by the conventional theory, but lends support to Gold's unorthodox view.
Gold's theory "explains best what we actually encountered in deep drilling operations," said Robert Hefner III, a natural gas geologist who has discovered vast gas deposits in Oklahoma over the last three decades, tapped by some of the deepest wells ever drilled. According to conventional theory, it should be impossible for petroleum or natural gas to even exist at such depths, because the pressure and the high temperatures should have "cooked" the hydrocarbons away, Hefner said in an interview yesterday.
Echoing Gold's view, Hefner said that astronomers have found hydrocarbons such as methane on virtually every planet and moon ever studied, as well as the far corners of the universe - places where the conventional view of hydrocarbons forming from decaying remains of living organisms couldn't possibly apply. "It's unlikely [oil on Earth and other planets] got there in two different ways. . . . It probably came from the same place, not from squished fish and dinosaurs."
Few people have been convinced so far. A single test of the theory has been carried out - a pair of wells drilled more than 3 miles deep in Sweden, with results generally seen as inconclusive. Gold had hoped to produce a commercial oil well, which might have cinched his case, but only a few barrels worth of oil came up. He attributes the poor showing to clogging by fine magnetite particles that he said are consistent with his theory.
But Gold is no stranger to being out on a limb with a scientific theory. In 1967, he suggested that newly-discovered pulsing sources of radio emission in the sky were actually rapidly-spinning collapsed stars, called neutron stars. The idea was considered so outlandish that he was not even allowed to speak at a scientific meeting on the subject. Less than a year later, however, his idea had been universally accepted, and remains the textbook explanation for what became known as pulsars.
Not all his ideas have been on target. His prediction that the moon was covered with such fine dust that astronauts might sink right in and be swallowed up once they set foot there caused NASA great - and ultimately unnecessary - anxiety. Gold, however, still maintains that his basic point, that the moon is covered mostly by fine dust rather than solid rock, was actually proved right.
If Gold turns out to be right about "fossil" fuels, then the world will be a very different place: Almost anyplace on Earth could become an oil producer just by drilling deep enough, and petroleum won't ever run out in the foreseeable future.
But nobody's betting on it at this point. "Most petroleum geologists don't agree with his theory," Nation said. "But it's fun to talk about."
David Chandler can be reached by e-mail at chandler@globe.com.
Fields are refilling because they were produced too quickly, therefore outlying struture didn't have time to drain into area they were producing. It happens all the time. It doesn't support this theory.
Renewable may be however on a geologic or worse cosmic timetable.
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You can put all the truly major discoveries of oil by size on a time bar graph, starting with the giant East Texas Field in 1912 and including the Middle East, Russia, and anyplace else. Despite our ability to go deeper and explore in more inhospitable conditions, the discovery fields continue to get smaller and smaller in size.
The inescapable conclusion is that we've already discovered the "easy" oil that's out there. Could the reserves underlying Antarctica be equivalent to what we've already discovered elsewhere? Conceivably, but we may never know. The politics and economics won't allow it.
Will we discover another "East Texas Field" in the Lower 48? Not a chance.
By the way, the East Texas Field has been mostly plugged now. It's done.
Yes. Except, I have to wonder how large the lake that would contain all the available oil in the world would be.
In a way FR could be thought of as a think-tank. Ideas are often thrown onto the table, sometimes outrageous ideas. It should be noted that a percentage of asteroids and meteors are what they call carbonaceous chondrites:- frozen, mucky, carbon-rich bodies. One might assume that earth itself is made from the same stuff with the exact proportions controlled by its solar environment. Simply burning carbon fuels doesn't remove carbon from the earth, it goes back eventually into the sea and is subducted under the continents, there to be cycled through once more. In the long run, totally renewable. Maybe we can consume the hydrocarbons faster than they are produced, but that is a self-limiting process. When we run low, we will slow down; it's automatic, not a source of concern.
Wall Street Journal article:Odd Reservoir Off Louisiana Prods Oil Experts to Seek a Deeper Meaning
regards
But keep in mind that this is a very few instances out of literally hundreds of thousands of fields. If this were happening frequently, it would be a different matter.
The conventional wisdom is that the hydrocarbons we are finding and recovering didn't originate in that particular rock layer. Instead, we believe it originated from a source rock (usually a shale) and migrated upward until it hits a layer which it can't penetrate. We look for those seals, and hope to find hydrocarbons trapped underneath.
A lot of things can cause oil to migrate even today. A minor earthquake is a shift of those rocks and it is those new faults that provide a crack for upward migration.
There are any number of such explanations which could account for an old field recharging with new oil from below. In fact, under conventional thinking, it would be surprising if this DIDN'T occur once in awhile.
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