Imagine

Matthew Hoy
By Matthew Hoy on April 21, 2008

What if "fossil fuels" weren't made of fossils at all? What if the earth naturally made petroleum? What if gasoline was a renewable resource?

Imagine the howls from the environmentalist left if there was no such thing as "peak oil."

It may be true.

Just what the latest Brazil find (dubbed "Sugarloaf Mountain") could mean to our oil-ravenous world isn’t yet completely clear, but the Associated Press quoted Roger Read, an energy analyst at New York-based investment bank Natixis Bleichroeder Inc., as saying, "This would lay to rest some of the peak oil pronouncements that we were out of oil, that we weren't going to find any more, and that we have to change our way of life."
Thomas Gold

The find also brings up a name worth remembering: Thomas Gold. The Austrian-born astrophysicist, who died in 2004, was a renowned maverick in the science community, a brilliant rogue whose anti-establishment proclamations were often proven right. For instance, in the 1960s, as NASA began its assault on the moon, many scientists debated whether the moon's surface was comprised of hard rock or might in fact be a layer of dust so thick that, upon touchdown, the Apollo lunar modules would sink out of sight. Gold, studying evidence from microimpacts, moon cratering, electrostatic fields, and more, boldly predicted that the astronauts' boots would sink into the lunar regolith no more than three centimeters. And, give or take a centimeter or so, he was proven right.

What does Gold have to do with the recent Brazil oil find? In 1999, Gold published "The Deep Hot Biosphere," a paper that postulated that coal and oil are produced not by the decomposition of fossils, but in fact are "abiogenic" -- the product of tectonic forces; i.e., deeply embedded hydrocarbons being brought up and through the earth's mantle and transformed into their present states by bacteria living in the earth's crust.

The majority of the world’s scientists scoff at Gold's theory, and "fossil fuel" remains the accepted descriptor of oil.

The interesting fact is this:

Yet in recent years Russia has quietly become the world's top producer of oil, in part by drilling wells as deep as 40,000 feet -- far below the graveyards of T-Rex and his Mesozoic buddies.

If this last fact is true, then the geological establishment has some explaining to do as to why there's petroleum that deep in the Earth.

I'm not quite old enough to have lived through a scientific revolution of the sort that my parents or grandparents did. Both those generations remember the change in cosmological theory and practice that marked the end of the steady state theory of the universe and embraced the "Big Bang."

Hopefully this will prove true right about the same time that this whole global warming charade is exposed as a fraud.

UPDATE!

Michael Wade over at A Secondhand Conjecture digs up some more on abiogenic oil -- it's good, informative reading.

0 comments on “Imagine”

  1. [...] A major new oil find in Brazil does more than push back the date of our demise.  It lends credence to an idea that frightens the pessimists.  You see, these fields and several being drilled in Russia, are very deep - much deeper than any dinosaur bones are going to be.  Indeed, they’re deep enough that most existing explanations for their existence needs to be - um - revised. In 1999, [Thomas] Gold published “The Deep Hot Biosphere,” a paper that postulated that coal and oil are produced not by the decomposition of organic materials, but in fact are “abiogenic” — the product of tectonic forces; i.e., deeply embedded hydrocarbons being brought up and through the earth’s mantle and transformed into their present states by bacteria living in the earth’s crust. [...]

  2. [...] Hoystory poses a thought-provoking question with potentially dramatic consequences for the concept of “peak oil”: What if “fossil fuels” weren’t made of fossils at all? What if the earth naturally made petroleum? What if gasoline was a renewable resource? [...]

  3. As I told my co-blogger Michael, this is not a very good article. Abiogenic oil is not taken very seriously by the scientific community.
    This quote is particularly ignorant:
    "Yet in recent years Russia has quietly become the world’s top producer of oil, in part by drilling wells as deep as 40,000 feet — far below the graveyards of T-Rex and his Mesozoic buddies."

    It's a myth that oil is made from dinosaur bones, so this reasoning is particularly flawed, proving that automotive magazines aren't the best place from which to get your geological science lessons.

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