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Abiotic oil?

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Pandora:
What If Oil and Natural Gas Are Renewable Resources?


--- Quote ---The evidence is mounting that not only do we have more than a century's worth of recoverable oil in the United States alone (even if there is a limit to the earth's oil supply), but that we also actually have a limitless supply of Texas tea because oil is in fact a renewable resource that is being constantly created deep under the earth's surface and which rises upward, where microscopic organisms that thrive in the intense pressure and heat miles below us interact with and alter it.

...

Scientist Thomas Gold presents the decades-old theory of "abiotic" oil-creation, which supports these facts, in his book, The Deep Hot Biosphere.  In it he explains that the idea of the "biotic" creation of "fossil fuels" -- that decaying organic matter is compressed into oil -- is incorrect.  In fact, the earth is constantly producing new oil very deep below its surface, and in some cases the oil flows up to replenish existing oil fields thought to be exhausted.  In simple terms, the microscopic organisms mentioned above interact with the hydrocarbons, altering them and leaving their footprint, thus disproving the notion that oil is a "fossil fuel."

Here's an example of how the process plays out:

    Eugene Island is an underwater mountain located about 80 miles off the coast of Louisiana in the Gulf of Mexico. In 1973 oil was struck and off-shore platform Eugene 330 erected. The field began production at 15,000 barrels a day, then gradually fell off, as is normal, to 4,000 barrels a day in 1989. Then came the surprise; it reversed itself and increased production to 13,000 barrels a day. Probable reserves have been increased to 400 million barrels from 60 million. The field appears to be filling from below and the crude coming up today is from a geological age different from the original crude, which leads to the speculation that the world has limitless supplies of petroleum.

The theory of what Gold calls the deep hot biosphere was explored more fully in Stalinist Russia in the 1940s when the Russian dictator demanded that his scientists find a way to increase Soviet oil production.  As they explored the idea that oil and other hydrocarbons are constantly being generated deep beneath the earth's surface, Russian technology was developed in the 1970s to test the theory by drilling as deep as 40,000 feet into the earth.  As a result, Russia was the first nation to begin to understand and exploit these renewable oil reserves, and today their oil industry is thriving.
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I'm sure the Russian scientists in the Stalinist '40s were scrambling around for a way to keep their heads, so I don't know how much credence I put into their discoveries then for why Russia's oil industry is thriving today.


--- Quote ---The political implications for Barack Obama and the radical environmentalist base he panders to with his corrupt "renewable" energy policy are profound.  First, as we've seen, the president continually misrepresents the amount of recoverable oil available to us.  His assertion that we have "only two percent of the world's oil reserves" available to us is simply a lie, as Susan Duclos documents in this piece.  We're awash in oil reserves, and it's up to our political candidates to expose Obama's baseless fabrications about our energy reserves.
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Several comments to the effect of "must've been a hell of a lot of dead dinosaurs down there; we haven't run out yet".  The author is correct, too, about many geologists' opinion of oil's origin; they do pooh-pooh the abiotic oil theory.

Libertas:
Anytime heat and biological mass interact many processes should be present so it is not too far fetched to think that renewable oil supply is possible.  The fact that older wells resume productive output seems to indicate something is occuring.  But the alt-energy cultists will not allow anything to ruin their meme that oil is finite and peak oil hit 30 years ago and continues to decline.  I would argue the decline is man made, much like the junk science of AGW.

Glock32:
Whether it's entirely from decayed biomatter or not, one thing I've never seen properly addressed is the ongoing nature of the process. We like to think of it as dead dinosaurs, but the huge bulk of that biomass was probably from simple organisms like algae and primitive plants. My question is, hasn't biomass continuously been consumed by the Earth ever since? Wouldn't the same geologic process occur on all this comparatively more recent biomass, so instead of Dead Dinosaur Oil we might have Dead Stuff-That-Lived-Right-After-The-Dinosaurs Oil?

Either way, we have a lot more exploitable oil than we have been led to believe for the past 40 years. There's been an awful lot of disease, hunger, and death as a direct consequence of this manufactured scarcity. But what's new about Leftists having blood on their hands?

charlesoakwood:

It's part of the carbon cycle.

Glock32:
Right, so doesn't it follow that "new" oil is being continuously produced by these processes deep in the Earth?  Their retort might be that it takes millions of years and we're extracting it faster than it's being replenished, but these accounts of depleted wells suddenly becoming productive again makes me doubt that.

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