I ran across a reference to the Abiogenic fossil fuel theory. Apparently this guy thinks that hydrocarbons in the form of natural gas interact with bacteria deep below the surface of the earth to create crude oil and coal. As for the natural gas, he says that it is a natural process in the earths core that produces it. He says that this is proven by the fact that crude oil often contains helium and that oil fields seem to be replenishing themselves. Helium (when released it leaves the atmosphere, never to return) is lighter than air so it only could have become trapped in the oil if the oil were produced underground. The replenishing oil fields are proven, he says, by the fact that during the 1970’s oil crisis it was estimated that we would have run out of fuel in the 90’s, but obviously we didn’t. He doesn’t have anything but a summary of his work on his page but I was surprised to learn that the debate between Abiogenic and Biogenic processes for the formation of “fossil fuels" has been going on since 1890. Just another example of things they don’t teach you in school. So the question is… is there any real evidence to support the Abiogenic claim or is it crap like the flat earth?
If you look closely at coal, you can quite easily see that it is made from plant material - leaf imprints, wood grain, twigs etc can all be readily observed in a very fine state of preservation.
Thomas Gold’s been around for quite a while. He’s shown up here on the Board quite a few times. Back in the 1980s he drilled a (possibly more than one - I don’t recall) well on the Siljan Ring which is a ring of fractures attributed to a meteor impact. The idea was that the fracture zone permeability and porosity might extend deep enough that they might test his theory without having to drill all the way through the crust.
The results were “inconclusive.” He doesn’t have many adherents in the oil and gas business. So, no credible hard evidence exists yet to support his idea. I don’t think he disputes the biogenic origin of some hydrocarbons.
He’s a thinker, and I respect that. He’s also the same guy who predicted the lunar lander would sink out of sight into the dust on the moon’s surface.
I not really qualified to comment on the geology, but …
For a start, none of this is new. I can remember twenty years ago when Gold was claiming that the decisive tests of the hypothesis were already in progress and the matter should be settled quickly (the Siljan Ring stuff Ringo mentions).
But the major alarmist predictions in the 70s were by the Club of Rome. It seems rather widely accepted that the reason their predictions didn’t pan out was because of the continuing discovery of new fields.
Anyway, for this argument to work, the fields would have to be replenishing on a timescale of decades. If that really were the case, given a few billion years of geological history, we should be wading through oil.
Gold has certainly had a particularly interesting career. Nothing he proposes can be dismissed just because “he’s a nut”, yet his track record is controversial. From his CV:
The biggie here is obviously cosmology: with Bondi and Hoyle, he was one of the three names particularly associated with the steady state model. My reading of that affair is that Gold was slightly lucky in the way it initially played out. The three initially thrashed out their ideas during their service in WWII - where Bondi and Gold shared a billet. Yet Gold always seems the junior partner. One nuance that’s usually overlooked is that, once they published, Hoyle’s emphasis was distinctly different from that of Bondi and Gold’s. Furthermore, by this stage Gold had moved into zoology. That work on hearing has a certain celebrity amongst historians of physics, but I’m never sure whether this is quite justified. It’s one of those odd connections that’s particularly memorable and hence probably over emphasied as a result. Whatever, the huge profile of Hoyle and Bondi in the period allowed Gold to move back into theoretical astronomy. Then, of course, the steady state model turned out to be wrong in the end.
The one clear major hit of his career was proposing neutron stars as an explanation for pulsars. Yet, even then, there’s the slight suspicion that someone was bound to have made the suggestion. In the event, it happened to be Gold.
I’d meant to address those replenishing oil fields, but forgot when I typed out the above response. As bonzer points out, three decades of exploration efforts since the early 1970s have yielded many new discoveries. Also, our exploration methods have improved dramatically, as have our recovery methods; i.e., we can now get more out of a field than we could thirty years ago.
If there’re self-replenishing, in real time, oil fields out there, I’d like to know about 'em (there are some special, and very rare, cases of pressure drawdown allowing a breach that opens a previously untapped reservoir to an existing production wellbore - that’s not the mechanism Gold hypothesizes).
Thanks for the responses I have to say that I agree. My remaining questions is, does oil really have helium in it? If it does are there any good explanations for it being there?
Both oil and natural gas can have helium in them, although it’s typically found much more often with natural gas than with oil. There are some gas wells that have a very large amount of helium in them - IIRC, in the old days there were some wells in Kansas that were more than 20% helium by volume, although webelements.com says that 7% by volume might be a typical “high” number nowadays. The helium is typically thought to be an accumulation of the products of radioactive decay, although I have no definitive cite for that.
Petroleum has virtually no helium in it – the solubility of helium is too low. Natural gas, OTOH, can have a good deal – up to 0.5%, IIRC (although not all gas fields are so rich in it).
As for where it comes from – radioisotopes that are more massive than the limit of stability (Z=208) generally decay through emitting an alpha particle (radioisotopes with too high or low a proton/neutron ratio generally decay through emitting a beta particle). “Alpha particle” is just another name for “nucleus of a helium atom”. The helium atoms diffuse through micro-fissures in the rock, same as natural gas molecules (mostly, although not entirely, methane) do, until they are “capped off” by impenetrable rock layers, and Bob’s your uncle.
