Re: Peak oil is an balloon, let's break it.

From: Pat Fallon (pfallon_at_ptd.net)
Date: 02/17/05 

Date: Wed, 16 Feb 2005 21:28:29 -0500

>>Pat Fallon wrote:

>><snip>
>> IMHO, "Peak Oil" is bogus. Oil is NOT a fossil fuel!

>"tadchem" <thomas.davidson@dla.mil>

>A benchtop demonstration that "Methane was formed from FeO,
>CaCO3-calcite, and water at pressures between 5 and 11 GPa and
>temperatures ranging from 500°C to 1,500°C" should not be understood
>to imply that naturally occurring methane *is* produced that way.
>Glass can be made from sand with thermonuclear detonations, too.

Valid point.
The fact that something can be done in the laboratory does not mean that it is happening naturally.

But it is evidence that it could be happening at the pressures and temperatures found in the mantle.

BTW, have hydrocarbons been produced in the lab simulating the lower pressure and temperature fossil fuel formulation scenario?

I ask because, as I understand it, hydrocarbons do not spontaneously evolve at these lower pressures and temps...
In August 2002, in the "Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (US)," Dr. Kenney published a paper, which had a partial title of "The genesis of hydrocarbons and the origin of petroleum." Dr. Kenney and three Russian coauthors conclude:

"The Hydrogen-Carbon system does not spontaneously evolve hydrocarbons at pressures less than 30 Kbar, even in the most favorable environment. The H-C system evolves hydrocarbons under pressures found in the mantle of the Earth and at temperatures consistent with that environment."

>A few years ago the late Prof. Tommy Gold (Cornell) and the Swedish
>State Power Board ran a test well into the Siljan Ring to tap the
>"primordial gas" he expected to find there. The site is an ancient
>meteoric impact crater which has been sealed for over 370 MYa:
>http://www.unb.ca/passc/ImpactDatabase/images/siljan.htm
>Tommy Gold was disappointed.

But others have had much more luck finding hydrocarbons from "basement reservoirs".

[http://www.geoscience.co.uk/geofrc/geobasetop.html]

"Hydrocarbon Production From Fractured Basement Reservoirs":

"This compilation presents brief details of the occurrences of commercial hydrocarbon reservoirs in fractured basement rocks from approximately 30 different countries. By definition, the review concentrates only on those reservoirs found in igneous, metamorphic and volcanic rocks.

Recent work by Kitchka (1998), supports the theory of an inorganic mantle origin of petroleum. His paper introduces the concept that petroleum represents a complex derivative of the fluid inclusions saturated with hydrocarbons in crustal and mantle minerals. He concludes that the multi-stage segregation and migration of deep petroleum are realized by fracturing and faulting. He cites a total of 370 oil and gas fields with commercial productivity from crystalline basement. Other hypotheses by Kropotkin (1986), Krishna (1988), Szatmari (1989), Porfir'ev (1974), Hunt (1998), and Gold (1980 & 1985) also consider the abiogenic/ mineral origin of petroleum."

>Naturally occurring petroleum also includes trace heterocyclic
>compounds and polycyclic aromatic structures (such as pyridine and
>indole) that could not be synthesized from "FeO, CaCO3-calcite, and
>water" because this recipe lacks the necessary reduced nitrogen.

I'll have to get up to speed on this point.

I know that Gold thinks that the biological origin of some sets of molecules (hopane, pristine,phytane, steranes and certain porphyrins) found in all commercial oil are not of the biological origin of the oils themselves, but by a contamination with microbial (bacteria) materials.

And as i understand it, some petroleum from deeper levels lack almost completely the biological evidence.

Oil extracted from varying depths from the same oil field have the same chemistry - oil chemistry does not vary as fossils vary with increasing depth. The hydrocarbon deposits of a large area often show common chemical or isotopic features quite independent of the varied composition of the geological ages of the formations in which they are found. Crude oil examples anywhere from the Middle East can be distinguished from oil in any part of South America or from the oil of West Africa.

Also interesting is the fact that oil is found in huge quantities among geographic formations where assays of prehistoric life are not sufficient to produce the existing reservoirs of oil. Where then did it come from?

Methane is found in many locations where a biogenic origin is improbable or where biological deposits seem inadequate: in great ocean rifts in the absence of any substantial sediments; in fissures in igneous and metamorphic rocks even at great depth; in active volcanic regions even where there is a minimum of sediments, and there are massive amounts of methane hydrates (methane-water combinations) in permafrost and ocean deposits where it is doubtful that an adequate quantity and distribution of biological source material is present.

And at any given time, thousands of coal veins are ablaze around the world. In China's northwestern province of Xinjiang alone, there are currently about 2,000 underground coal fires burning. Indonesia currently hosts as many as 1,000.

Some of these fires have been burning for thousands of years; Burning Mountain Nature Reserve, for example, in New South Wales, Australia, has been aflame for an estimated 5,500 years. Other coal fires are of more recent vintage, often started through the actions of the notoriously destructive human species. But underground coal fires long predate mankind's proclivity for starting them, and many of the fires burning today are due to entirely natural causes.

New Scientist noted, in February 2003, that "coal seam fires have occurred spontaneously far back into geological history." ("Wild Coal Fires are a 'Global Catastrophe'," New Scientist, February 14, 2003) Radio Nederland added that "Geological evidence from China suggests that underground coal fires have been occurring naturally for at least one million years." (Anne Blair Gould "Underground Fires Stoke Global Warming," Radio Nederland, March 10, 2003)

It is estimated that in China alone, some 200 million tons of coal go up in smoke every year. That's a hell of a lot of coal. More coal than China exports, in fact. In other words, the world's leading coal exporter loses more coal to underground fires than it produces for export.

Coal is a member of the same hydrocarbon family as oil and natural gas, and it is, like gas and oil, claimed to be a 'fossil fuel' created in finite, non-renewable quantities. And yet this allegedly precious and limited resource has been burning off at the rate of millions of tons per year, year in and year out, for at least a million years, and probably much longer.

This raises, in my mind at least, one very obvious question: how is it possible that nature has been taking an extremely heavy toll on the globe's 'fossil fuels' for hundreds of thousands of years (at the very least), without depleting the reserves that were supposedly created long, long ago; and yet man, who has been extracting and burning 'fossil fuels' for the mere blink of an eye, geologically speaking, has managed to nearly strip the planet clean?

>And then there's that helium and free nitrogen problem...

Not sure what you're referring to here. I know that helium is correlated with oil fields...Helium is so often present in oil fields that helium detectors are used as oil-prospecting tools. Helium is an inert gas known to be a fundamental product of the radiological decay or uranium and thorium, identified in quantity at great depths below the surface of the earth, 200 and more miles below. It is not found in meaningful quantities in areas that are not producing methane, oil or natural gas. It is not a member of the dozen or so common elements associated with life. It is found throughout the solar system as a thoroughly inorganic product. I thought the correlation of helium with oil was a problem for the fossil fuel theory...

Pat Fallon
pfallon@ptd.net

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