Pandora’s Box

[Tet]

Re: Pandora’s Box

so what are you saying? that the oil in the abandoned fields in tx will grow back? what, it oozes out of the earth? gee, guess there are some pretty stupid people in tx. let's all buy up their abandoned fields and start pumping all that oil they left behind! ha!

i don't buy the peak oil thing, am more in the ej camp... that oil declines slowly as the price goes up and conservation becomes the next big innovation. even the peak oil guys have already phase shifted the fin de la monde prediction at least once. but i do believe oil is the remnant of old plants. it's not intuitive, but geological processes aren't.

I can see how you wouldn't expect the 35% asshanding crude has received since the end of summer. Mighty nice of those Rooskies to give all that oil away considering they're going to run out a week from next Tuesday. Dumb Rooskies.

[Corporate Plebe]

Re: Pandora’s Box

I'm kind of in the same thinking as yourself which is why I'd like your opinions about this claim:

from Amazon Editorial Review of Black Gold Stranglehold:

In Black Gold Stranglehold, Jerome Corsi and Craig Smith expose the fraudulent science that has made America so vulnerable: the belief that oil is a fossil fuel and that it is a finite resource. This book reveals the conclusions reached by Dr. Thomas Gold, a professor at Cornell University, in his seminal book The Deep Hot Biosphere: The Myth of Fossil Fuels (Copernicus Books, 1998) and accepted by many in the scientific community that oil is not a product of fossils and prehistoric forests but rather the bio-product of a continuing biochemical reaction below the earth's surface that is brought to attainable depths by the centrifugal forces of the earth's rotation.

[jk]

Re: Pandora’s Box

I'm kind of in the same thinking as yourself which is why I'd like your opinions about this claim:

from Amazon Editorial Review of Black Gold Stranglehold:

no need for any of that stuff once we've got our perpetual motion machines hooked up. besides, that geology stuff can't be right if the earth is only 6000 years old.

btw, the people who shot dodo's and passenger pigeons used the same logic: they never ran out of them before!

[Tet]

Re: Pandora’s Box

I'm kind of in the same thinking as yourself which is why I'd like your opinions about this claim:

from Amazon Editorial Review of Black Gold Stranglehold:

I believe there is about three theories to oil's formation, none of them have anything to do with the transformation of plant matter into crude. I've heard of Gold and read a few things from Gold but I think it's best to start with the source because that's where Gold gets or steals his information from.

Ukrainian Theory Of Deep Abiotic Petroleum Origins
http://www.gasresources.net/index.htm

I didn't search very long for this link, I recall there being a better one but I think this points you in the right direction.

It's been a few years since I researched this so I'm a bit rusty, but it sure did come in handy to recognize a top to the price of crude. Good luck.

[Tet]

Re: Pandora’s Box

btw, the people who shot dodo's and passenger pigeons used the same logic: they never ran out of them before!

Insanity is also defined as repeating the same process and expecting a different outcome. I'd suggest buying into the Tar Sand Scam, nothing but solid trustworthy stocks come out of Toronto. Bre-X revisited.

[Corporate Plebe]

Re: Pandora’s Box

Thank you for responding wits this information.

[slg]

Re: Pandora’s Box

“The suggestion that petroleum might have arisen from some transformation of squashed fish or biological detritus is surely the silliest notion to have been entertained by substantial numbers of persons over an extended period of time.” Fred Hoyle 1982

And Sir Fred was spectacularly wrong yet again. Not only does oil come from biological debris, you can even use particular compounds in the oil to track it back to the sedimentary rocks where it originated. Deffeyes has some nice examples in his books. Dissolve a chunk of limestone (a sedimentary rock commonly rich in organic matter); you'll find a sheen of oil on top. (Yes, I've done it many times.) And oil shale is an oil source rock that thru geologic happenstance never got cooked into oil. It's a sedimentary rock that's full of biological debris--in places it even contains fish fossils!

[slg]

Re: Pandora’s Box

We have been running out of oil ever since oil was discovered.

A red herring. Oil "peaking" is not the same as oil "running out." And oil-producing regions around the world have repeatedly peaked. Starting with the US Lower 48 in the early 1970s, as King Hubbert had predicted back in the 1950s.

A lack of reinvestment causes production declines, or at least that's what I'd gather looking at the thirty year old pumps that they still use in Long Beach.

Really? The early 1970s "oil shock" led to massive exploration efforts in the lower 48. In particular, Texas production was expected to soar as rig counts skyrocketed. What in fact happened was that production dropped, from ~3.5 Mbbl/day to ~2.3 Mbbl/day, even as producing wells went from ~168K in 1972 to ~220K in 1985. Current production is a bit over 1 Mbbl/day.

You find oil when it's easy to find. As the easy stuff is exhausted, you're caught up in a serious case of diminishing returns as you spend more and more effort to get less and less oil.

(And yes, I'm a geologist who's worked in the oil patch.)

[slg]

Re: Pandora’s Box

Not to put too fine a point on it, but Tommy Gold's deep abiogenic oil idea is complete crackpottery. I attended the session at the Geological Society of America's annual meeting some years back where data from the experimental borehole at Siljan, Sweden, which had been drilled to test Gold's ideas, were presented.

I've never seen such shoddy science. Parts-per-million concentrations of gases were touted as potential indicators of commerical gas. Degraded drilling lubricants, as shown by gas chromatography, were claimed to be oil shows, and so reported in the popular media. Grains of magnetite (Fe3O4) were touted as evidence of bacterial activity, when they were in fact much more probably products of drill-steel oxidation. A colleague at the USGS who worked briefly with Gold on some of these investigations eventually refused to work with him any further.

But yes, you can find "abiogenic oil" references all over the Web. As I used to tell students when I taught geology, a great deal of what's on the Web is worth exactly what you paid for it.

If you want a much better reference, look at David Howell et al., The Future of Energy Gases, US Geological Survey Professional Paper 1570, 1993. Contrast Tommy's paper therein with John Castaño's on the prospects for the Siljan basin.

[Tet]

Re: Pandora’s Box

And Sir Fred was spectacularly wrong yet again. Not only does oil come from biological debris, you can even use particular compounds in the oil to track it back to the sedimentary rocks where it originated. Deffeyes has some nice examples in his books. Dissolve a chunk of limestone (a sedimentary rock commonly rich in organic matter); you'll find a sheen of oil on top. (Yes, I've done it many times.) And oil shale is an oil source rock that thru geologic happenstance never got cooked into oil. It's a sedimentary rock that's full of biological debris--in places it even contains fish fossils!

Certainly hydrocarbons passing through sedimentary layers are going to pick up some of the organic matter. Odd don't you think when you look at crude from 7 miles beneath the earth's crust none of these biological markers can be found. Your view says crude goes higher, my view says crude goes lower. TWT.

[slg]

Re: Pandora’s Box

Certainly hydrocarbons passing through sedimentary layers are going to pick up some of the organic matter.

If the hydrocarbons were introduced, we should see evidence of that. Oil flows a lot, and it leaves abundant traces of its passage when it does.

That's not what we see. Oil shale in fact contains kerogen--very high molecular weight stuff that doesn't flow.

Odd don't you think when you look at crude from 7 miles beneath the earth's crust none of these biological markers can be found. Your view says crude goes higher, my view says crude goes lower. TWT.

_What_ crude 7 miles down? Any citations for this? (Btw, at ordinary geothermal gradients HCs bigger than methane aren't stable at such depths.)

[jk]

Re: Pandora’s Box

Not to put too fine a point on it, but Tommy Gold's deep abiogenic oil idea is complete crackpottery. I attended the session at the Geological Society of America's annual meeting some years back where data from the experimental borehole at Siljan, Sweden, which had been drilled to test Gold's ideas, were presented.

I've never seen such shoddy science. Parts-per-million concentrations of gases were touted as potential indicators of commerical gas. Degraded drilling lubricants, as shown by gas chromatography, were claimed to be oil shows, and so reported in the popular media. Grains of magnetite (Fe3O4) were touted as evidence of bacterial activity, when they were in fact much more probably products of drill-steel oxidation. A colleague at the USGS who worked briefly with Gold on some of these investigations eventually refused to work with him any further.

But yes, you can find "abiogenic oil" references all over the Web. As I used to tell students when I taught geology, a great deal of what's on the Web is worth exactly what you paid for it.

If you want a much better reference, look at David Howell et al., The Future of Energy Gases, US Geological Survey Professional Paper 1570, 1993. Contrast Tommy's paper therein with John Castaño's on the prospects for the Siljan basin.

thanks for posting on this, sig. much appreciated.

[slg]

Re: Pandora’s Box

Oh, and one further thing. Fluids move around a lot in geologic systems, and they leave lots of traces behind when they do. They've been intense objects of study because they're often of economic importance, in systems like ore deposition as well as hydrocarbon occurrence. I've worked on such things a fair amount myself.


Attributing the hydrocarbons to outside introduction is simply an ad-hoc excuse by people who haven't looked at the rocks.