Guess he never read his science book where it says this:
"Methane gives Neptune its blue cloud color."
Posted on 03/05/2006 1:03:29 PM PST by billorites
Thomas Gold was not your typical radical. Far from being a mad scientist, he was a brilliant professor of astronomy at Cornell University, but he succeeded in driving many others mad with theories that flew in the face of conventional wisdom.
His most controversial idea was among his last, and geologists and petroleum experts around the world still rage against Gold for suggesting they were dead wrong in their understanding of how oil and gas are formed in the Earth's crust.
Now, a couple of decades after Gold first suggested that hydrocarbons are formed deep underground by geological processes and not just below the surface by biological decay, there is increasing evidence that he may have been on to something.
If he was wrong, he may have erred only in taking his idea too far. Gold argued that all hydrocarbons are formed in the intense pressure and high heat near the Earth's mantle, around 100 miles under the ground. If he was right, it means the finite limits of the resources that power our cities and our factories and our vehicles have been vastly overstated.
Oil and gas fields are continually replenished by hydrocarbons manufactured far below the Earth, he argued. So there is no fuel crisis. As long as the Earth grinds along on its orbit around the sun, hydrocarbons will continue to be produced, and we can all roll along with no fear of running out of gas.
It should be said at this point that virtually no experts believe that to be the case. But several prestigious organizations have found evidence that methane, the main component of natural gas, can indeed be formed under conditions like those found deep in the Earth.
Researchers at the Carnegie Institution's Geophysical Laboratory in Washington, D.C., Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Harvard University, Argonne National Laboratory and Indiana University in South Bend have joined forces to see if they can replicate the geological processes that Gold claimed would produce hydrocarbons.
And the evidence so far suggests that methane, at least, can be produced independent of biological materials. When such common materials as iron oxide, calcite and water are squeezed under pressures more than 100,000 times those found at sea level and heated up to 2700 degrees Fahrenheit, methane does form.
That's very close to conditions found 100 miles under the ground. But it's not likely to convince many that Gold was right.
"All we've done is show experimentally that at the pressure at the Earth's mantle and pretty high temperatures you can indeed make methane," says Henry Scott, a physics and geology professor at Indiana University and lead author of a report on the research in a recent issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Scott is pretty sure of that because he's seen it with his own eyes, thanks to a magnificent machine. A diamond anvil, which squeezes material between two diamonds, was used to simulate the pressures found deep within the Earth. And since a microscope can see through the diamonds, the results could be witnessed in real time.
And those results, Scott says, are quite compelling.
"Gold said that when you squeeze things down at very high pressures, the basic chemistry can change," he says. "That's exactly what we are doing."
Scott says he wasn't very optimistic when he first started working with the diamond anvil while at Carnegie. He says it was a slow day on a Friday afternoon when he decided to take some minerals and subject them to enormous pressures and high temperatures.
"I expected nothing to happen," he says. "But sure enough, it formed methane. It was a bit of a shock."
Lawrence Livermore picked up at that point and found that methane production was most productive at 900 degrees Fahrenheit and 70,000 atmospheres of pressure. That's still hot, and it's still deep, but it suggests that methane may be abundant throughout the planet.
Like Gold, Livermore may have carried it a bit too far when it suggested in a news release that "These reserves could be a virtually inexhaustible source of energy for future generations."
There's a problem here. No one is going to drill a well 100 miles into the Earth. Even five or six miles is a really deep well.
"It's not even foreseeable that we would try to drill down to it," Scott says.
But there is a possibility that some of those methane deposits, if they really do exist deep within the Earth, may find their own way to the surface, following weaknesses in the crust, for example.
That's what Tommy Gold said would happen.
A few years ago, Sweden bought into that, big time. Officials there began drilling a deep well in a formation that Gold said could contain hydrocarbons that would be clearly of a non-biological origin. That would prove him right.
The newspaper I was working for in those days packed me off to Sweden to see what they were finding. Unfortunately, they weren't finding much.
They never found Gold's postulated gusher. But maybe Scott has. Not deep within the Earth. In a diamond anvil, where methane was produced just the way Gold said it would be.
Tommy Gold died last year. He would have loved this.
I have days like that.
Actually Petroleum ITSELF, not the rocks around it, contains chemical indications of the diatoms, bacteria, etc. it formed from...
For example:
http://www.stw.nl/projecten/B/bar/bar5275.htm
"Chemical fossils are characteristic compounds found in oils that are derived from specific algae and bacteria, which were abundant during the deposition of the source rock of the oil. Since these organisms, and therefore their characteristic compounds, were only evolving during specific periods in Earth's history, they are used to constrain the age of petroleums. This is of significant benefit for solving exploration and production problems of oil companies, especially when source rocks of oils are not known for instance with deeper buried source rocks. However, the number of useful age-related chemical fossils is still limited, especially in the age-range 0-180 my. Chemical fossils of diatoms may provide useful age-diagnostic compounds since they evolved during that time period but unfortunately little is known about the composition and evolutionary origing of diatom lipids. Therefore, we porpose to grow a wide diversity of extant diatom species and etermine their lipid composition as well as their 18S ribosomal RNA (rRNA) sequences. These sequences will be used to establish relationships between different diatom species."
And again one has to get by the basic problem that the majority of the people eagerly buying into the "oil is not a fossil fuel" theories all seem to believe that stupid mainstream geologists think oil comes from the dead bodies of Brontosauruses...
And also,I suspect, don't even know or understand what plankton or a diatom is.
The only people who want us to believe oil will run out are the ecco-terrorists who think we are killing the planet.
this does not reccomend the theory as credible. Remember Lysenko's biology.To leftists reality is a mental construct and the more extreme leftists, those who are in real power and can prevent their "theories" from being rebutted like to engage in reconstruction.
Millenia ago the Jupiterians got addicted to beans and cabbage. It was the end of their world.
Thus the only question remaining is: -- why is that fact ignored when we discuss the formation of hydrocarbons on earth?
There is a vast, vast, vast, vast difference between Methane and the hydrocarbons in petroleum.
So the people that sell hydrocarbons claim. - Isn't that amazing. -- Gold however explains in his book how biological activities can form petroleum from methane, deep in the "hot biosphere" .
Quite the strawman construction there...precisely nobody has ever claimed all methane is biological.
But you fellas claim all petroleum is scarce because it's biological. - A self serving argument when you sell the stuff, no?
Earth is hollow with a miniature sun at the center. The entrance is at the north pole, and UFOs come from there.................
You just HAD to let it out, didn't you?
Quite right. Now, where does the Earth get these particular fossils, 100 miles underground where petroleum is ostensibly produced? Wouldn't most of the (non-biological) petroleum end up in completely different layers, or (more likely) associated with igneous rocks? How is it possible that paleontologists can help to locate oil deposits by looking at the types of fossils, if the fossils are very old, but the petroleum deposits are not?
Just because you say something doesn't mean it is true. This article only suggests that methane could possibly be produced... but to say that all hydrocarbons are created via another process instead of organic means seems to be a stretch of the imagination. Just ask any paleontologist who works for an oil company.
Inorganic oil & gas ping
Quite the amazing coincidence that basically all the oil on earth is found precisely where biological theories of the origin of oil say it will be found. :-)
This is a terrible sentence. Does it mean there is more than was thought or less? It is completely unclear.
Yes, you are right. If I say that I have $4.00 in my checking account, but there are really $25,000.00 in it, I have understated the limit of my financial resources.
On threads like these, people are violently allergic to anyone who might actually have any idea of what they're talking about.
Not true: Coal, yes. But not oil. Look at the age of the rock ABOVE the oil.
What I find surprising is how many posters here seem to think this "must be true". If that is the case why do we have oil wells drying up? Why are they not constantly being replentished? Maybe they are but they cannot match the rate at which they are being pumped. Either way, this seems dead wrong.
On threads like these, people are violently allergic to anyone who might actually have any idea of what they're talking about.
On threads like these, people have always been violently allergic to anyone who 'argues from authority'; -- claiming that they themselves are the only ones who "actually have any idea of what they're talking about".
I am no expert... but I took a course in paleontology and it was taught by a petroleum geologist, so he focused the class on microfossil groups like the foraminifera.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.