Scientist stirs the cauldron: oil, he says, is renewable

Boston Globe | May 22, 2001 | David L. Chandler

[Double Tap]

Actually Dog Gone is dead on. Many fields that took hundreds of millions of years to form are now depleted, this is fact. Not all of the fields are depleted, as is obvious by the fact that we are still making gasoline, but some have definitely being depleted.

Given another hundred million years, those fields may regenerate, but so what.

[Double Tap]

See what?

[74dodgedart]

Unless oil is being created at the rate of millions of barrels a day (I think the US alone goes through 12 mil a day) then its really a moot point.

[spycatcher]

Thomas Gold developed the Steady State Theory with Hoyle and Bondi

[Dog Gone]

I don't know anything about Russian or central Asian geology, but when you hit basement rocks in America they certainly don't produce hydrocarbons.

I've been involved in drilling wells that were nearly 5 miles deep and I can assure you that they don't get better the deeper you go.

[balrog666]

Rather than adjusting facts to support the theory, he changes the theory to support the facts.

Well said!

[JoeSchem]

Gold is the P. T. Barnum of the oil industry. Same old stuff that he's being touting for years. Don't believe it.

Proof?

[Aurelius]

According to one source, at its largest, great Salt Lake had an area of 6,200 sq km or 6.2 billion sq m. At a uniform depth of 1/2 ft., if I haven't made a mistake, that would be a volume of 1.88 trillion liters.

[spycatcher]

The post above the post that says "see above"

The Russians are milking basement rock like crazy and it's helped to drive oil prices down to their current levels.

[CubicleGuy]

"It's life Jim, but not as we know it"!

Maybe oil is a byproduct of Hortas.

[CubicleGuy]

Rather than adjusting facts to support the theory, he changes the theory to support the facts.

The search for truth is not achieved by replacing incorrect theories with correct ones; it's done by replacing incorrect theories with new ones that are more subtly wrong.

[michigander]

All the oil in the world

[Aurelius]

Theories shouldn't be judged in a two-valued system of "correct" and "incorrect", but on a continuous, opened-ended scale proceeding from worse to better. The "complete, perfect theory" being an unattainable end. And maybe a one-dimensional scale is inadequate.

[RightWhale]

Thomas Gold

Is it possible that he and Sagan had the same high-grade source?

[Aurelius]

Source of what? I assume you are referring to Carl Sagan?

[JoeSchem]

There's no article link?

[Leisler]

If oil comes from dead and decayed living organisims, where did they get their carbon mass? Isn't a lot of wasted/spilled oil consumed by microorganisms? Why couldn't they make it? Plants make oil, people and animals make oil, why not bacteria?