Organic vs Inorganic Oil production

Just to toss this out there to the amateur(hopefully a pro or two as well) geologists. How plausible is the Inorganic theory of crude oil production.

For those unfamiliar, the theory is that crude is more likely the product of outgassing and that biological components can be explained in other ways. Here’s a UNB article descibing the two theories.

Here’s a rather simple Greenpeace article mentioning that it is the accepted Russian geologist view(paragraph d)

Here’s an article by Thomas Gold at Cornell, he’s a modern western proponent of the theory.

It’s not that we’re ignoring you, it’s that you Stumped the Panel.

< bump > from Page 2.

Good luck in your quest! :smiley:

Future Shock:

I think politicians in particular, the public in general and even scientists who should know better miss the implications of the accelerating rate of scientific progress. Who cares if nuclear waste starts leaking from canisters in Yucca Mountain when in 50 year’s time we’ll be able to send in an army of autonomous robots to take care of it. Not only is science accelerating, but the rate of acceleration is accelerating. Ray Kurzweil, in his book “Fantastic Voyage,” states that science is progressing exponentially, and he predicts that the 21st century will experience 20,000 times the progress of the 20th century. (The thrust of his book is (for baby boomers like us) is how to live long enough to live forever, primarily through nutritional supplements, according to him, until medicine learns to reverse the aging process. The only politician who seems to get it is Newt Gingrich who claimed in a 2008 speech, if memory serves, that looking back to the year 2008 in 25 years time would be like looking back to the 1880’s from today–that’s Newt Gingrich not me. What form will this future shock take? Let’s take a look. At some point, humanity will experience the rate of progress of the entire 20th century in less than a year’s time, then in less than a month, then less than a week, a day, an hour, a second . . . , but even the perfect future, you can’t build a Hoover Dam in a microsecond or travel to a star. I foresee some point in the not so distant future, when there’ll be no point in beginning long-term projects like the Hoover Dam or the Panama Canal because the science and engineering would be repeatedly leapfrogged before the project even got well underway. For instance, say we undertook today an Apollo project to travel to Alpha Centauri. Evan at today’s modest rate of progress, the propulsion technology would be leapfrogged to where a second spaceship would overtake the first spaceship before the first ship got beyond the Oort Cloud, then a third ship would overtake the second one before it even got beyond Neptune, etc. This is the stultifying paradox of progress: who will shell out for this year’s automobile if next year’s model makes this year’s look like a model T. But the progress paradox wouldn’t extend cyberspace. While you can’t build a physical Hoover Dam in a microsecond, you can build the equivalent in a microsecond in a quantum computer. Who’ll get in a physical conveyance to visit grandma when your avatars can interact every bit as vividly in cyberspace, so I foresee that the progress paradox will force humanity into cyberspace sometime in this century, leaving our physical bodies and physical world completely behind.

Once we’ve made the leap to entangling bosons in quantum computers we’ll detect the entangled bosons of The Borg in the form of dark energy, for you see, we won’t have been the first civilization to make the quantum leap.

Sorry I posted “Future Shock” on the wrong thread, here’s my understanding of abiotic (inorganic) oil:

I’ve also come to the conclusion for an abiotic origin for petroleum hydrocarbons, but I got there by examining a different problem.

A good case has been made for end Pleistocene comet impacts over Northern Lake Michigan and the Hudson Bay due to the orientation of the Carolina Bays along the east coast of the continental United States and through Kansas and Texsas, but where are the corresponding comet impact craters and where’s the melt rock?

Then there’s mystery of the 0.77-ma Australasian tektite event.

And what about the Great Unconformity that disapears a billion years of rock over the Grand Canyon with similar unconformities elsewhere on continental shields and platforms across the globe, and what of the granddady of them all, the PT-extinction event? In fact show me one single solitary impact crater on the planet that’s been tied to a comet.

Here’s a thought. Perhaps the fantastic pressures of comet impacts cause endothermic chemical reactions that absorb a majority of the kinetic energy, resulting in impact craters disguised as structural basins, and without the melt rock.

The two most common components of comets are carbon dioxide and water, and an endothermic chemical reaction of these two ices would do the trick.

Hmm, over geological timescales, could zombie corpses be processed into oil?

No, it wouldn’t.

If you think it would, show the math.

Endothermic reactions only go forward when they have positive entropy and high temperature. This reaction will never take place. If you had chosen hydrogen and carbon dioxide, the reaction might occur at very high pressures and pressures.

Not sure. Perhaps we should investigate if zombie threads could be turned into oil?