To summerize: Oil is a product of inorganic processes at the deepest parts of the Earth’s crust. If we drill deep enough, or tap naturally occuring fissures, there’s an enormous reservoir beyond our wildest dreams just waiting for the taking.
To me it sounds like desperate clutching at straws, but I can’t discount the theory to any degree. It also scares me that another few centuries of oil burning could fall into our grubby hands.
Interesting article, but I wonder if it’s good science or wishful thinking. There are a lot of vested interests in ignoring the possibility of an oil crisis.
Also, be very, very leary of this source. WorldNetDaily occaisionally stumbles across some facts, but usually manages to dust itself off and keep moving. In this case, it looks like they’ve inflated and distorted Thomas Gold’s theory. Note that his book “The Deep Hot Biosphere” specifically ascribes this to biogenic sources:
I believe that the OP is referring to the theory of Dr. Gold (of Cornell University), who postulates that oil is inorganically produced from high=pressure methane, in the earths crust. Gold also believes that coal is essentially dried-up petroleum (from which allof the volatile compunds have escaped. This actually makes sense, because if coal were actually carbonized ancient plants, it shoud not contain any mercury! (Burning coal is a MAJOR source of mercury pollution).
The US EPA is now getting coal-burning electric plants to reduce their mercury emissions…as far as I know, mercury is not founf in any plant matter.
Pretty big If, I think. The fact that there is oil down there is pointless if it is not economical to retrieve it. From what I understand about the ‘Peak Oil’ theory, they do not so much look at the total amount of oil left … they look at the amount of oil that can be pumped efficiently enough to be worth it. (which IIRC is usually about half the reservoir.) In other words, it seems clear that it would cost more energy to get oil from that deep than that oil could produce. I’d say there would have to be some pretty big tech leaps to make it possible.
One of the theory of the nonbiological origins of oil is that it is partly biological in origin after all - but not of this planet. I think it’s called the panspermia theory - but the short of it is that life is everywhere in the universe and traveling interstellerily, if not interglactically (yes I know I mangled those words, but I have no spell checker). ‘Life’ has created some very interesting organic compounds which we burn as oil.
Dr. Thomas Gold is an iconoclastic thinker. And a thinker he is; he’s tackled, or perhaps I should say attacked, many subjects over the years. While I respect his often original perspective, he is one who, while not always right, is seldom in doubt. He was also the one who predicted the lunar lander would sink out of sight in the lunar surface dust.
But he’s always brought a rationale to the party. We’ve discussed his thoughts several times before on this board.
Now, two decades after his Siljan Ring drilling efforts to demonstrate his hypothesis of abiogenic methane brought inconclusive results, additional labratory endeavors cast a bit of hope on the idea. We’re still a long way from demonstrating the phenomenon in situ and further yet from identifying how we might trap and exploit such methane reserves, if they exist.
So, go Tommy. While his ideas remain outside the loop at the moment, I respect the guy for throwing his brain at a problem.
My take on J. F. Kenney is a little bit different.
WND apparently has ‘recycled’ a Wall Street Journal article from 1999 (linked in the WND article), while adding a bit of speculation of its own. It’s fairly clear the WND writer has little knowledge of his subject from the fact that he refers to “dinosaurs and plants” as the generally accepted organic sources of oil. This is completely wrong; the main organic sources are presumed to be microscopic marine organisms such as plankton and diatoms.
There apparently is a Eugene Island 330 platform, although it’s fairly clear from the original source material that the subject under discussion is Eugene Island Block 330, classed as a supergiant field with at least ten production platforms operated by various companies producing from it.
Here’s a (rather technical) detailed description of the field compiled by the American Association of Petroleum Geologists, also in 1999:
Producing zones include some 25 major sand units at depths ranging from 2300 to about 12000 feet below mean sea level.
The other sources I looked at (mainly from the AAPG and abstracts of a couple of university research studies) generally agree that the most likely source for the additional hydrocarbons is a unit of Cretaceous sediments about 15000-16000 feet below sea level, or a few thousand feet below the main Eugene 330 producing zones, which are mainly of Pleistocene age. Cretaceous sediments are well known as both hydrocarbon sources and reservoirs worldwide, and I would treat with extreme caution any claims that the hydrocarbons ‘mysteriously’ appearing in the 330 field are coming from some other source, at least until further study of the lower source zone is undertaken. The presence of this lower, older, source, and communication with the upper sands through faulting, is a perfectly adequate explanation for both the difference in hydrocarbon composition from early to late production in the 330 field, and the replenishment process.
The conflation of Gold’s theories with the apparent replenishment of the 330 field appears to to have been mainly a product the WSJ’s writer hearing speculation by a few personnel of one particular company that had done some exploration on Block 330. In any event, in my short search, I found no peer-reviewed material that considered Gold’s theories to be worth serious consideration as a explanation for what is going on there.
Anyone who is interested can find all this info for themselves: make an exact phrase search on Google under “Eugene Island 330” and read up, then draw your own conclusions.
There’s a lot of misinformation here. I know that on the SD any thread older than 2 days is essentially dead and no one cares, but I need to post something here.
First, coal does contain some mercurry, but it’s typically a very small amount - on the order of 0.01 to 0.2 ppm dry whole-coal basis. It also contains a wide arrary of other trace elements, such as cadmium, arsenic, lead, selenium, etc. - and a large amount of mineral elements, such as silica, alumina, calcium, sodium…
Before I answer where these all come from, let’s answer the real question, which is “what is coal as the power plant sees it?” Coal is rarely just pure hydrocarbon material. It consists of the coal itself, plus mining waste and unwanted rocks and minerals - a decent amonut of the rock matter from the floor and roof of the mine are sent to the plant, where it is pulverized along with the coal and sent into the furnace. Any minerals in this rock will be liberated as a result of this. Next, we have the inorganics contained within the coal but not in the coal matrix - these are the calcium aluminasilicate clays, iron pyrites, and other minerals that are trapped within the coal, but not part of the coal. Very often there are seams of bands of rock, clay, snadstone, limestone, and other sediment deposits within the coal, and these of course get sent on to the plant just like the coal does.
Finally, there are inorganics within the coal itself. And yes, there is mercury in those inorganics. Some of it is in the form of sulfur compounds, some in the form of mercury-chloride compounds, and some even free as elemental mercury. The proportion of embedded inorganic:trapped inorganic:mining waste mercury varies wildly from mine to mine.
So overall, it’s not surprising that coal has mercury (and other elements) within it.
The next problem of course is that petroleum has similar trace elements within it - high levels of vanadium, nickel, chromium etc. - higher than would be found in plant life in nature. So by that same standard one could say that petroleum couldn’t have a biological origin. However, remember that oil has sat in a rocky reservoir for a few million years or so, and has had time to leach out these minerals. And they do leach too - a common problem of oil (and orimulsion plants) is the risk of these same minerals leaching out of the small amount of ash produced when the ash is rained upon.
Finally, one more issue on the mechanics - coal is not solid oil. Plant matter can very frequently be found in coal, as can fossils. Whole twigs and sometimes entire tree trunks can be found in coal beds, which in part is one of the backings for those who believe that the many coal deposits around the world are proof of Noah’s great flood.
I won’t comment on the coal plants being a large source of mercury - they are, but not as large as most people think. I can dig up a cite by a Mr. Levin of EPRI who has worked with data from the EPA and around the world to show that perhaps only 2% of worldwide mercury is the result of US power plant emissions. However, since there’s no real minimum completely safe level of mercury exposure, even 0.1% is bad. Major sources of mercury emissions include chloralkali plants, burning municipal refuse, the some parts of the electronics industry, and Chinese residential coal burning.
And finally, the EPA does not currently have the regualtions in place for mercury reduction at coal power plants. The limits and BACT and so forth are being argued about quite vociferously, with the usual suspects making their usual political claims.
