By Dave McGowan <dave@davesweb.cnchost.com>
http://educate-yourself.org/cn/davemcgowanstalinandabioticoil05mar05.shtml
March 5, 2005
Original Title
Stalin And Abiotic Oil
This story really begins in 1946, just after
the close of World War II, which had illustrated quite
effectively that oil was integral to waging modern,
mechanized warfare. Stalin, recognizing the importance of
oil, and recognizing also that the Soviet Union would have
to be self sufficient, launched a massive scientific
undertaking that has been compared, in its scale, to the
Manhattan Project. The goal of the Soviet project was to
study every aspect of petroleum, including how it is
created, how reserves are generated, and how to best pursue
petroleum exploration and extraction.
The challenge was taken up by a wide range of scientific
disciplines, with hundreds of the top professionals in their
fields contributing to the body of scientific research. By
1951, what has been called the Modern Russian-Ukrainian
Theory of Deep, Abiotic Petroleum Origins was born. A
healthy amount of scientific debate followed for the next
couple of decades, during which time the theory, initially
formulated by geologists, based on observational data, was
validated through the rigorous quantitative work of
chemists, physicists and thermodynamicists. For the last
couple of decades, the theory has been accepted as
established fact by virtually the entire scientific
community of the (former) Soviet Union. It is backed up by
literally thousands of published studies in prestigious,
peer-reviewed scientific journals.
For over fifty years, Russian and Ukrainian scientists have
added to this body of research and refined the
Russian-Ukrainian theories. And for over fifty years, not a
word of it has been published in the English language
(except for a fairly recent, bastardized version published
by astronomer Thomas Gold, who somehow forgot to credit the
hundreds of scientists whose research he stole and then
misrepresented).
This is not, by the way, just a theoretical model that the
Russians and Ukrainians have established; the theories were
put to practical use, resulting in the transformation of the
Soviet Union - once regarded as having limited prospects, at
best, for successful petroleum exploration - into a
world-class petroleum producing, and exporting, nation.
J.F. Kenney spent some 15 years studying under some of the
Russian and Ukrainian scientists who were key contributors
to the modern petroleum theory. When Kenney speaks about
petroleum origins, he is not speaking as some renegade
scientist with a radical new theory; he is speaking to give
voice to an entire community of scientists whose work has
never been acknowledged in the West. Kenney writes
passionately about that neglected body of research:
The modern Russian-Ukrainian theory of deep, abiotic
petroleum origins is not new or recent. This theory was
first enunciated by Professor Nikolai Kudryavtsev in 1951,
almost a half century ago, (Kudryavtsev 1951) and has
undergone extensive development, refinement, and application
since its introduction. There have been more than four
thousand articles published in the Soviet scientific
journals, and many books, dealing with the modern theory.
This writer is presently co-authoring a book upon the
subject of the development and applications of the modern
theory of petroleum for which the bibliography requires more
than thirty pages.
The modern Russian-Ukrainian theory of deep, abiotic
petroleum origins is not the work of any one single man --
nor of a few men. The modern theory was developed by
hundreds of scientists in the (now former) U.S.S.R.,
including many of the finest geologists, geochemists,
geophysicists, and thermodynamicists of that country. There
have now been more than two generations of geologists,
geophysicists, chemists, and other scientists in the U.S.S.R.
who have worked upon and contributed to the development of
the modern theory. (Kropotkin 1956; Anisimov, Vasilyev et
al. 1959; Kudryavtsev 1959; Porfir'yev 1959; Kudryavtsev
1963; Raznitsyn 1963; Krayushkin 1965; Markevich 1966;
Dolenko 1968; Dolenko 1971; Linetskii 1974; Letnikov, Karpov
et al. 1977; Porfir'yev and Klochko 1981; Krayushkin 1984)
The modern Russian-Ukrainian theory of deep, abiotic
petroleum origins is not untested or speculative. On the
contrary, the modern theory was severely challenged by many
traditionally-minded geologists at the time of its
introduction; and during the first decade thenafter, the
modern theory was thoroughly examined, extensively reviewed,
powerfully debated, and rigorously tested. Every year
following 1951, there were important scientific conferences
organized in the U.S.S.R. to debate and evaluate the modern
theory, its development, and its predictions. The All-Union
conferences in petroleum and petroleum geology in the years
1952-1964/5 dealt particularly with this subject. (During
the period when the modern theory was being subjected to
extensive critical challenge and testing, a number of the
men pointed out that there had never been any similar
critical review or testing of the traditional hypothesis
that petroleum might somehow have evolved spontaneously from
biological detritus.)
The modern Russian-Ukrainian theory of deep, abiotic
petroleum origins is not a vague, qualitative hypothesis,
but stands as a rigorous analytic theory within the
mainstream of the modern physical sciences. In this respect,
the modern theory differs fundamentally not only from the
previous hypothesis of a biological origin of petroleum but
also from all traditional geological hypotheses. Since the
nineteenth century, knowledgeable physicists, chemists,
thermodynamicists, and chemical engineers have regarded with
grave reservations (if not outright disdain) the suggestion
that highly reduced hydrocarbon molecules of high free
enthalpy (the constituents of crude oil) might somehow
evolve spontaneously from highly oxidized biogenic molecules
of low free enthalpy. Beginning in 1964, Soviet scientists
carried out extensive theoretical statistical thermodynamic
analysis which established explicitly that the hypothesis of
evolution of hydrocarbon molecules (except methane) from
biogenic ones in the temperature and pressure regime of the
Earth's near-surface crust was glaringly in violation of the
second law of thermodynamics.
They also determined that the evolution of reduced
hydrocarbon molecules requires pressures of magnitudes
encountered at depths equal to such of the mantle of the
Earth. During the second phase of its development, the
modern theory of petroleum was entirely recast from a
qualitative argument based upon a synthesis of many
qualitative facts into a quantitative argument based upon
the analytical arguments of quantum statistical mechanics
and thermodynamic stability theory. (Chekaliuk 1967; Boiko
1968; Chekaliuk 1971; Chekaliuk and Kenney 1991; Kenney
1995) With the transformation of the modern theory from a
synthetic geology theory arguing by persuasion into an
analytical physical theory arguing by compulsion, petroleum
geology entered the mainstream of modern science.
The modern Russian-Ukrainian theory of deep, abiotic
petroleum origins is not controversial nor presently a
matter of academic debate. The period of debate about this
extensive body of knowledge has been over for approximately
two decades (Simakov 1986). The modern theory is presently
applied extensively throughout the former U.S.S.R. as the
guiding perspective for petroleum exploration and
development projects. There are presently more than 80 oil
and gas fields in the Caspian district alone which were
explored and developed by applying the perspective of the
modern theory and which produce from the crystalline
basement rock. (Krayushkin, Chebanenko et al. 1994)
Similarly, such exploration in the western Siberia cratonic-rift
sedimentary basin has developed 90 petroleum fields of which
80 produce either partly or entirely from the crystalline
basement. The exploration and discoveries of the 11 major
and 1 giant fields on the northern flank of the
Dneiper-Donets basin have already been noted. There are
presently deep drilling exploration projects under way in
Azerbaijan, Tatarstan, and Asian Siberia directed to testing
potential oil and gas reservoirs in the crystalline
basement.
http://www.gasresources.net/index.htm
It appears that, unbeknownst to Westerners, there have
actually been, for quite some time now, two competing
theories concerning the origins of petroleum. One theory
claims that oil is an organic 'fossil fuel' deposited in
finite quantities near the planet's surface. The other
theory claims that oil is continuously generated by natural
processes in the Earth's magma. One theory is backed by a
massive body of research representing fifty years of intense
scientific inquiry. The other theory is an unproven relic of
the eighteenth century. One theory anticipates deep oil
reserves, refillable oil fields, migratory oil systems, deep
sources of generation, and the spontaneous venting of gas
and oil. The other theory has a difficult time explaining
any such documented phenomena.
So which theory have we in the West, in our infinite wisdom,
chosen to embrace? Why, the fundamentally absurd 'Fossil
Fuel' theory, of course -- the same theory that the 'Peak
Oil' doomsday warnings are based on.
I am sorry to report here, by the way, that in doing my
homework, I never did come across any of that "hard
science" documenting 'Peak Oil' that Mr. Strahl
referred to. All the 'Peak Oil' literature that I found, on
Ruppert's site and elsewhere, took for granted that
petroleum is a non-renewable 'fossil fuel.' That theory is
never questioned, nor is any effort made to validate it. It
is simply taken to be an established scientific fact, which
it quite obviously is not.
So what do Ruppert and his resident experts have to say
about all of this? Dale Allen Pfeiffer,
identified as the "FTW Contributing Editor for
Energy," has written:
"There is some speculation that
oil is abiotic in origin -- generally asserting that oil
is formed from magma instead of an organic origin. These
ideas are really groundless."
http://www.fromthewilderness.com
Here is a question that I have for both Mr.
Ruppert and Mr. Pfeiffer: Do you consider it honest,
responsible journalism to dismiss a fifty year body of
multi-disciplinary scientific research, conducted by
hundreds of the world's most gifted scientists, as
"some speculation"?
Another of FTW's prognosticators, Colin Campbell,
is described by Ruppert as "perhaps the world's
foremost expert on oil." He was asked by Ruppert, in an
interview,
"what would you say to the people
who insist that oil is created from magma ...?"
Before we get to Campbell's answer, we
should first take note of the tone of Ruppert's question. It
is not really meant as a question at all, but rather as a
statement, as in 'there is really nothing you can say that
will satisfy these nutcases who insist on bringing up these
loony theories.'
http://www.fromthewilderness.com
Campbell's response to the question was an interesting one:
"No one in the industry gives the
slightest credence to these theories."
Why, one wonders, did Mr. Campbell choose to
answer the question on behalf of the petroleum industry? And
does it come as a surprise to anyone that the petroleum
industry doesn't want to acknowledge abiotic theories of
petroleum origins? Should we have instead expected something
along these lines?:
http://www.davesweb.cnchost.com
The Center for an Informed America
NEWSLETTER #52
March 13, 2004
Cop v CIA (Center for an Informed America)
The Most Important Center for an
Informed America Story in Two Years...
On February 29, 2004, I received the following e-mail
message from Michael Ruppert of From
the Wilderness:
I challenge you to an open, public debate on the subject of
Peak Oil; any time, any place after March 13th 2004. I
challenge you to bring scientific material, production data
and academic references and citations for your conclusions
like I have. I suggest a mutually acceptable panel of judges
and I will put up $1,000 towards a purse to go to the winner
of that debate. I expect you to do the same. And you made a
dishonest and borderline libelous statement when you
suggested that I am somehow pleased that these wars of
aggression have taken place to secure oil. My message all
along has been, "Not in my name!" Put your money
where your mouth is. But first I suggest you do some
homework. Ad hominem attacks using the word
"bullshit", unsupported by scientific data are a
sign of intellectual weakness (at best). I will throw more
than 500 footnoted citations at you from unimpeachable
sources. Be prepared to eat them or rebut them with
something more than you have offered.
Wow! How does high noon sound?
Before I get started here, Mike, I need to ask you just one
quick question: are you sure it was only a "borderline
libelous statement"? Because I was really going for
something more unambiguously libelous. I'll see if I can do
better on this outing. Let me know how I do.
Several readers have written to me, incidentally, with a
variation of the following question: "How can you say
that Peak Oil is being promoted to sell war when all of the
websites promoting the notion of Peak Oil are stridently
anti-war?"
But of course they are. That, you see, is precisely the
point. What I was trying to say is that the notion of 'Peak
Oil' is being specifically marketed to the anti-war crowd --
because, as we all know, the pro-war crowd doesn't need to
be fed any additional justifications for going to war; any
of the old lies will do just fine. And I never said that the
necessity of war was being overtly sold. What I said, if I
remember correctly, is that it is being sold with a wink and
a nudge.
The point that I was trying to make is that it would be
difficult to imagine a better way to implicitly sell the
necessity of war, even while appearing to stake out a
position against war, than through the promotion of the
concept of 'Peak Oil.' After September 11, 2001, someone
famously said that if Osama bin Laden didn't exist, the US
would have had to invent him. I think the same could be said
for 'Peak Oil.'
I also need to mention here that those who are selling 'Peak
Oil' hysteria aren't offering much in the way of
alternatives, or solutions. Ruppert, for example, has stated
flatly that "there is no effective replacement for what
hydrocarbon energy provides today." (http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/052703_9_questions.html)
The message is quite clear: "we're running out of oil
soon; there is no alternative; we're all screwed." And
this isn't, mind you, just an energy problem; as Ruppert has
correctly noted, "Almost every current human endeavor
from transportation, to manufacturing, to plastics, and
especially food production is inextricably intertwined with
oil and natural gas supplies." (http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/102302_campbell.html)
If we run out of oil, in other words, our entire way of life
will come crashing down. One of Ruppert's
"unimpeachable sources," Colin Campbell, describes
an apocalyptic future, just around the corner, that will be
characterized by "war, starvation, economic recession,
possibly even the extinction of homo sapiens." (http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/102302_campbell.html)
My question is: if Ruppert is not selling the necessity of
war, then exactly what is the message that he is sending to
readers with such doomsday forecasts? At the end of a recent
posting, Ruppert quotes dialogue from the 1975 Sidney
Pollack film, Three Days of the Condor: (http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/013004_in_your_face.html)
Higgins: ...It's simple economics.
Today it's oil, right? In 10 or 15 years - food,
Plutonium. And maybe even sooner. Now what do you think
the people are gonna want us to do then?
Turner: Ask them.
Higgins: Not now - then. Ask them when
they're running out. Ask them when there's no heat in
their homes and they're cold. Ask them when their engines
stop. Ask them when people who've never known hunger start
going hungry. Do you want to know something? They won't
want us to ask them. They'll just want us to get it for
them.
The message there seems pretty clear: once
the people understand what is at stake, they will support
whatever is deemed necessary to secure the world's oil
supplies. And what is it that Ruppert is accomplishing with
his persistent 'Peak Oil' postings? He is helping his
readers to understand what is allegedly at stake.
Elsewhere on his site, Ruppert warns that "Different
regions of the world peak in oil production at different
times ... the OPEC nations of the Middle East peak last.
Within a few years, they -- or whoever controls them -- will
be in effective control of the world economy, and, in
essence, of human civilization as a whole." (http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/102302_campbell.html)
Within a few years, the Middle East will be in control of
all of human civilization?! Try as I might, I can't imagine
any claim that would more effectively rally support for a
U.S. takeover of the Middle East. The effect of such
outlandish claims is to cast the present war as a war of
necessity. Indeed, a BBC report posted on Ruppert's site
explicitly endorses that notion: "It's not greed that's
driving big oil companies - it's survival." (http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/040403_oil_war_bbc.html)
On the very day that Ruppert's challenge arrived, I received
another e-mail, from someone I previously identified -
erroneously, it would appear - as a "prominent
critic" of Michael Ruppert. In further correspondence,
the writer, Jeff Strahl, explained that he
is (a) not a critic of Ruppert in general, but rather a
critic only of Ruppert's stance on certain aspects of the
9-11 story, and (b) not all that prominent. This is what Mr.
Strahl had to say:
"I'm a participant in a relatively
new website (http://911research.wtc7.net),
which has done lots of work regarding the WTC and Pentagon
side of the 9/11 events, especially the
physical evidence which reveals the official story
as a complete hoax. Under "talks"
you'll find a slide show I've done (and will do again) in
public on the Pentagon aspects. This is all simply to let
you know I'm far from an apologist for the status quo. Nor
am I an apologist for Mike Ruppert, with whom in fact I
got into a donnybrook of a fight on public email lists
over his denial of the relevancy of physical evidence and
the fact that an article full of disinformation about the
WTC collapse, written 9/13/01, was still on his website,
unedited or corrected, two years later. He finally gave in
and printed a (sort of) retraction.
That said, I have to take issue with your
stance re Peak Oil, something you say you wish were true,
but deny, not on the basis of any information, but on the
basis that you seem to think it's too good to be true, and
that it's all info presented by Ruppert, which you thus
suspect since you suspect Ruppert. Matter of fact, Peak
Oil was predicted by an oil geologist, King Hubbert, way
back in the mid '60s, before Ruppert was even in college.
It's been pursued since then by lots of people in the
science know-how, including Dale Allen Pfeiffer, Richard
Heinberg, Colin Campbell and Kenneth Deffeyes. The
information is quite clear, global oil production has
either peaked in the last couple of years or will do so in
the next couple, as Hubbert predicted decades ago (He
predicted Peak Oil in the US as happening in the early
'70s, was laughed at, but his prediction came true right
on schedule). The science here is quite hard, facts are
available from lots of sources. Perhaps Hubbert was part
of a long-planned disinfo campaign that was planned way
back in the '60s, and all the others are part of that
plot. I find it hard to believe that, and I am quite a
skeptic."
As for the relevancy of physical evidence,
it would appear that that is another bone that I have to
pick with Mr. Ruppert. But I will save that for another
time. For now, the issue is 'Peak Oil' (which, as you can
see, I am continuing to enclose in quotation marks, which
is, as regular readers know, how I identify things that
don't actually exist).
For the record, I never said that Michael Ruppert was the
only one presenting information about 'Peak Oil.' I said
that he was the most prominent of those promoting the idea.
I also never implied that Ruppert came up with the idea on
his own. I am aware that the theory has a history. The issue
here, however, is the sudden prominence that 'Peak Oil' has
attained.
Lastly, let me say that, unlike you, Jeff, I am enough of a
skeptic to believe that an ambitious, well-orchestrated
disinformation campaign, possibly spanning generations,
should never arbitrarily be ruled out. I am also enough of a
skeptic to suspect that when a topic I have covered
generates the volume of e-mail that my 'Peak Oil' musings
have generated, then I must have managed to step into a
pretty big pile of shit. What I did not realize, until I
decided to take Mr. Ruppert's advice and "do some
homework," was that it was a much bigger pile than I
could have imagined.
I read through some, but certainly not all,
of the alleged evidence that Ruppert has brought to the
table concerning 'Peak Oil.' Since I have no interest in
financially supporting his cause, I am not a paid subscriber
and can therefore not access the 'members only' postings.
But I doubt that I am missing much. The postings that I did
read tended to be extremely redundant and, therefore, a
little on the boring side.
Ruppert's arguments range from the vaguely compelling to the
downright bizarre. One argument that pops up repeatedly is
exemplified by this Ruppert-penned line: "One of the
biggest signs of the reality of Peak Oil over the last two
decades has been a continual pattern of
merger-acquisition-downsizing throughout the industry."
Really? And is that pattern somehow unique to the petroleum
industry? Or is it a pattern that has been followed by just
about every major industry? Is the consolidation of the
supermarket industry a sign of the reality of Peak
Groceries? And with consolidation of the media industry,
should we be concerned about Peak News? Or should we,
perhaps, recognize that a pattern of monopoly control -
characterized by mergers, acquisitions, and downsizing -
represents nothing more than business as usual throughout
the corporate world?
Another telling sign of 'Peak Oil,' according to Ruppert and
Co., is sudden price hikes on gas and oil. Of course, that
would be a somewhat more compelling argument if the oil
cartels did not have a decades-long history of constantly
feigning shortages to foist sudden price increases on
consumers (usually just before peak travel periods).
Contrary to the argument that appears on Ruppert's site, it
is not need that is driving the oil industry, it is greed.
In what is undoubtedly the most bizarre posting that Ruppert
offers in support of his theory, he ponders whether dialogue
from an obscure 1965 television series indicates that the
CIA knew as far back as the 1960s about the coming onset of
'Peak Oil.' (http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/042003_secret_agent_man.html)
Even if that little factoid came from a more, uhmm, credible
source, what would the significance be? Hasn't the
conventional wisdom been, for many decades, that oil is a
'fossil fuel,' and therefore a finite, non-renewable
resource? Since when has it been an intelligence community
secret that a finite resource will someday run out?
A few readers raised that very issue in questioning my
recent 'Peak Oil' rants. "Even if we are not now in the
era of Peak Oil," the argument generally goes,
"then surely we will be soon. After all, it is
inevitable." And conventional wisdom dictates that it
is, indeed, inevitable. But if this website has one
overriding purpose, it is to question conventional wisdom
whenever possible.
There is no shortage of authoritatively stated figures on
the From the Wilderness website: billions of barrels of oil
discovered to date; billions of barrels of oil produced to
date; billions of barrels of oil in known reserves; billions
of barrels of oil consumed annually. Yadda, yadda, yadda. My
favorite figure is the one labeled, in one posting,
"Yet-to-Find." That figure, 150 billion barrels (a
relative pittance), is supposed to represent the precise
volume of conventional oil in all the unknown number of oil
fields of unknown size that haven't been discovered yet.
Ruppert himself has written, with a cocksure swagger, that
"there are no more significant quantities of oil to be
discovered anywhere ..."(http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/013004_in_your_face.html)
A rather bold statement, to say the least, considering that
it would seem to be impossible for a mere mortal to know
such a thing.
Ruppert's figures certainly paint a scary picture: rapid oil
consumption + diminishing oil reserves + no new discoveries
= no more oil. And sooner, rather than later. But is the
'Peak Oil' argument really valid? It seems logical -- a
non-renewable resource consumed with a vengeance obviously
can't last for long. The only flaw in the argument, I
suppose, would be if oil wasn't really a 'fossil fuel,' and
if it wasn't really a non-renewable resource.
"Conventional wisdom says the world's
supply of oil is finite, and that it was deposited in
horizontal reservoirs near the surface in a process that
took millions of years." So said the Wall Street
Journal in April 1999 (Christopher Cooper "Odd
Reservoir Off Louisiana Prods Oil Experts to Seek a Deeper
Meaning," Wall Street Journal, April 16, 1999). It
therefore logically follows that conventional wisdom also
says that oil will reach a production peak, and then
ultimately run out. (http://www.oralchelation.com/faq/wsj4.htm)
As I said a few paragraphs ago, the purpose
of this website is to question conventional wisdom -- by
acquainting readers with stories that the media overlook,
and with viewpoints that are not allowed in the mainstream.
It was my understanding that From the Wilderness, and other
'alternative' websites, had a similar goal.
But is 'Peak Oil' really some suppressed, taboo topic? If it
is, then why, as I sit here typing this, with today's (March
7, 2004) edition of the Los Angeles Times atop my desk, are
the words "Running Out of Oil -- and Time" staring
me in the face from the front page of the widely read Sunday
Opinion section? The lengthy piece, penned by Paul
Roberts, is replete with dire warnings of the
coming crisis. Save for the fact that the words 'Peak Oil'
are not routinely capitalized, it could easily pass for a
From the Wilderness posting.
(http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/opinion/la-op-roberts7mar07,1,107339.story)
The Times also informed readers that Roberts has a new book
due out in May, entitled The End of Oil: On the Edge of
a Perilous New World. Scary stuff. Beating Robert's
book to the stores will be Colin Campbell's
The Coming Oil Crisis, due in April. Both titles
will have to compete for shelf space with titles such as Richard
Heinberg's The Party's Over: Oil, War and the
Fate of Industrial Societies, published April of last
year; David Goodstein's Out of Gas: The
End of the Age of Oil, which just hit the shelves last
month; and Kenneth Deffeyes' Hubbert's
Peak: The Impending World Oil Shortage, published
October 2001. The field is getting a bit crowded, but sales
over at Amazon.com remain strong for most of the contenders.
The wholesale promotion of 'Peak Oil' seems to have taken
off immediately after the September 11, 2001 'terrorist'
attacks, and it is now really starting to pick up some
steam.
The BBC covered the big story last April (http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/040403_oil_war_bbc.html).
CNN covered it in October (http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/100203_cnn_peak_oil.html).
The Guardian covered it in December (http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/120303_bottom_barrel.html).
Now the Los Angeles Times has joined the chorus
I guess the cat is pretty much out of the bag on this one.
Everyone can cancel their subscriptions to From the
Wilderness and pocket the $35 a year, since you can read the
very same bullshit for free in the pages of the Los Angeles
Times.
Interestingly enough, there is another story about oil that,
unlike the 'Peak Oil' story, actually has been suppressed.
It is a story that very few, if any, of my readers, or of
Michael Ruppert's readers, are likely aware of. But before
we get to that story, let's first briefly review what we all
'know' about oil.
As anyone who stayed awake during elementary school science
class knows, oil comes from dinosaurs. I remember as a kid
(calm down, folks; there will be no Brady Bunch references
this week) seeing some kind of 'public service' spot
explaining how dinosaurs "gave their all" so that
we could one day have oil. It seemed a reasonable enough
idea at the time -- from the perspective of an
eight-year-old. But if, as an adult, you really stop to give
it some thought, doesn't the idea seem a little, uhmm ...
what's the word I'm looking for here? ... oh yeah, I
remember now ... preposterous?
How could dinosaurs have possibly created the planet's vast
oil fields? Did millions, or even billions, of them die at
the very same time and at the very same place? Were there
dinosaur Jonestowns on a grand scale occurring at locations
all across the planet? And how did they all get buried so
quickly? Because if they weren't buried right away, wouldn't
they have just decomposed and/or been consumed by
scavengers? And how much oil can you really squeeze from a
pile of parched dinosaur skeletons?
Maybe there was some type of cataclysmic event that caused
the sudden extinction of the dinosaurs and also buried them
-- like the impact of an asteroid or a comet. But even so,
you wouldn't think that all the dinosaurs would have been
huddled together waiting to become oil fields. And besides,
scientists are now backing away from the mass extinction
theory (http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-sci-extinction6mar06,1,3634810.story).
The Wall Street Journal article previously cited noted that
it "would take a pretty big pile of dead dinosaurs to
account for the estimated 660 billion barrels of oil in the
[Middle East]." I don't know what the precise
dinosaur-carcass-to-barrel-of-oil conversion rate is, but it
does seem like it would take a hell of a lot of dead
dinosaurs. Even if we generously allow that a single
dinosaur could yield 5 barrels of oil (an absurd notion, but
let's play along for now), more than 130 billion dinosaurs
would have had to be simultaneously entombed in just one
small region of the world. But were there really hundreds of
billions of dinosaurs roaming the earth? If so, then one
wonders why there is all this talk now of overpopulation and
scarce resources, when all we are currently dealing with is
a few billion humans populating the same earth.
And why the Middle East? Was that region some kind of Mecca
for dinosaurs? Was it the climate, or the lack of water and
vegetation, that drew them there? Of course, the region
could have been much different in prehistoric times. Maybe
it was like the Great Valley in the Land Before Time movies.
Or maybe the dinosaurs had to cross the Middle East to get
to the Great Valley, but they never made it, because they
got bogged down in the desert and ultimately became
(through, I'm guessing here, some alchemical process) cans
of 10W-40 motor oil.
Another version of the 'fossil fuel' story holds that
microscopic animal carcasses and other biological matter
gathered on the world's sea floors, with that organic matter
then being covered over with sediment over the course of
millions of years. You would think, however, that any
biological matter would decompose long before being covered
over by sediment. But I guess not. And I guess there were no
bottom-feeders in those days to clear the ocean floors of
organic debris. Fair enough. But I still don't understand
how those massive piles of biological debris, some
consisting of hundreds of billions of tons of matter, could
have just suddenly appeared, so that they could then sit,
undisturbed, for millions of years as they were covered over
with sediment. I can understand how biological detritus
could accumulate over time, mixed in with the sediment, but
that wouldn't really create the conditions for the
generation of vast reservoirs of crude oil. So I guess I
must be missing something here.
The notion that oil is a 'fossil fuel' was first proposed by
Russian scholar Mikhailo Lomonosov in 1757. Lomonosov's
rudimentary hypothesis, based on the limited base of
scientific knowledge that existed at the time, and on his
own simple observations, was that "Rock oil originates
as tiny bodies of animals buried in the sediments which,
under the influence of increased temperature and pressure
acting during an unimaginably long period of time, transform
into rock oil."
Two and a half centuries later, Lomonosov's theory remains
as it was in 1757 -- an unproved, and almost entirely
speculative, hypothesis. Returning once again to the Wall
Street Journal, we find that, "Although the world has
been drilling for oil for generations, little is known about
the nature of the resource or the underground activities
that led to its creation." A paragraph in the
Encyclopedia Britannica concerning the origins of oil ends
thusly: "In spite of the great amount of scientific
research ... there remain many unresolved questions
regarding its origins."
Does that not seem a little odd? We are talking here, after
all, about a resource that, by all accounts, plays a crucial
role in a vast array of human endeavors (by one published
account, petroleum is a raw ingredient in some 70,000
manufactured products, including medicines, synthetic
fabrics, fertilizers, paints and varnishes, acrylics,
plastics, and cosmetics). By many accounts, the very
survival of the human race is entirely dependent on the
availability of petroleum. And yet we know almost nothing
about this most life-sustaining of the earth's resources.
And even though, by some shrill accounts, the well is about
to run dry, no one seems to be overly concerned with
understanding the nature and origins of so-called 'fossil
fuels.' We are, rather, content with continuing to embrace
an unproved 18th century theory that, if subjected to any
sort of logical analysis, seems ludicrous.
On September 26, 1995, the New
York Times ran an article headlined "Geochemist
Says Oil Fields May Be Refilled Naturally." Penned by
Malcolm W. Browne, the piece appeared on page C1.
" Could it be that many of the
world's oil fields are refilling themselves at nearly the
same rate they are being drained by an energy hungry
world? A geochemist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic
Institution in Massachusetts ... Dr. Jean K. Whelan ...
infers that oil is moving in quite rapid spurts from great
depths to reservoirs closer to the surface. Skeptics of
Dr. Whelan's hypothesis ... say her explanation remains to
be proved ...
Discovered in 1972, an oil reservoir some 6,000 feet
beneath Eugene Island 330 [not actually an island, but a
patch of sea floor in the Gulf of Mexico] is one of the
world's most productive oil sources ... Eugene Island 330
is remarkable for another reason: it's estimated reserves
have declined much less than experts had predicted on the
basis of its production rate. "It could be," Dr.
Whelan said, "that at some sites, particularly where
there is a lot of faulting in the rock, a reservoir from
which oil is being pumped might be a steady-state system
-- one that is replenished by deeper reserves as fast as
oil is pumped out" ...
The discovery that oil seepage is continuous and extensive
from many ocean vents lying above fault zones has
convinced many scientists that oil is making its way up
through the faults from much deeper deposits ... A recent
report from the Department of Energy Task Force on
Strategic Energy Research and Development concluded from
the Woods Hole project that "there new data and
interpretations strongly suggest that the oil and gas in
the Eugene Island field could be treated as a steady-state
rather than a fixed resource." The report added,
"Preliminary analysis also suggest that similar
phenomena may be taking place in other producing areas,
including the deep-water Gulf of Mexico and the Alaskan
North Slope" ... There is much evidence that deep
reserves of hydrocarbon fuels remain to be tapped."
This compelling article raised a number of
questions, including: how did all those piles of dinosaur
carcasses end up thousands of feet beneath the earth's
surface? How do finite reservoirs of dinosaur goo become
"steady-state" resources? And how does the fossil
fuel theory explain the continuous, spontaneous venting of
gas and oil?
The Eugene Island story was revisited by the media
three-and-a-half years later, by the Wall Street Journal
(Christopher Cooper "Odd Reservoir Off Louisiana
Prods Oil Experts to Seek a Deeper Meaning," Wall
Street Journal, April 16, 1999). (http://www.oralchelation.com/faq/wsj4.htm)
Something mysterious is
going on at Eugene Island 330.
"Production at the oil field, deep in the Gulf of
Mexico off the coast of Louisiana, was supposed to have
declined years ago. And for a while. it behaved like any
normal field: Following its 1973 discovery, Eugene Island
330's output peaked at about 15,000 barrels a day. By
1989, production had slowed to about 4,000 barrels a day.
Then suddenly -- some say almost inexplicably -- Eugene
Island's fortunes reversed. The field, operated by
PennzEnergy Co., is now producing 13,000 barrels a day,
and probable reserves have rocketed to more than 400
million barrels from 60 million. Stranger still,
scientists studying the field say the crude coming out of
the pipe is of a geological age quite different from the
oil that gushed 10 years ago.
All of which has led some scientists to a radical theory:
Eugene Island is rapidly refilling itself, perhaps from
some continuous source miles below the Earth's surface.
That, they say, raises the tantalizing possibility
that oil may not be the limited resource it is assumed to
be. ...
Jean Whelan, a geochemist and senior researcher from the
Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts ...
says, "I believe there is a huge system of oil just
migrating" deep underground. ... About 80 miles off
the Louisiana coast, the underwater landscape surrounding
Eugene Island is otherworldly, cut with deep fissures and
faults that spontaneously belch gas and oil."
So now we are talking about a huge system of
migrating dinosaur goo that is miles beneath the Earth's
surface! Those dinosaurs were rather crafty, weren't they?
Exactly three years later (to the day), the media once again
paid a visit to the Gulf of Mexico. This time, it was
Newsday that filed the report (Robert Cooke "Oil
Field's Free Refill," Newsday, April 19, 2002). (http://csf.colorado.edu/forums/pkt/2002II/msg00071.html)
"Deep underwater, and deeper
underground, scientists see surprising hints that gas and
oil deposits can be replenished, filling up again,
sometimes rapidly.
Although it sounds too good to be true, increasing
evidence from the Gulf of Mexico suggests that some old
oil fields are being refilled by petroleum surging up from
deep below, scientists report. That may mean that current
estimates of oil and gas abundance are far too low. ..
. chemical oceanographer Mahlon "Chuck"
Kennicutt [said] "They are refilling as we speak. But
whether this is a worldwide phenomenon, we don't
know" ...
Kennicutt, a faculty member at Texas A&M University,
said it is now clear that gas and oil are coming into the
known reservoirs very rapidly in terms of geologic time.
The inflow of new gas, and some oil, has been detectable
in as little as three to 10 years. In the past, it was not
suspected that oil fields can refill because it was
assumed that oil was formed in place, or nearby, rather
than far below.
According to marine geologist Harry Roberts, at Louisiana
State University ... "You have a very leaky fault
system that does allow it (petroleum) to migrate in. It's
directly connected to an oil and gas generating system at
great depth." ...
"There already appears to be a large body of evidence
consistent with ... oil and gas generation and migration
on very short time scales in many areas globally"
[Jean Whelan] wrote in the journal Sea Technology ...
Analysis of the ancient oil that seems to be coming up
from deep below in the Gulf of Mexico suggests that the
flow of new oil "is coming from deeper, hotter
[sediment] formations" and is not simply a lateral
inflow from the old deposits that surround existing oil
fields, [Whelan] said."
Now I'm really starting to get confused. Can
someone please walk me through this? What exactly is an
"oil and gas generating system"? And how does such
a system generate oil "on very short time scales"?
Is someone down there right now, even as I type these words,
forklifting dinosaur carcasses into some gigantic cauldron
to cook up a fresh batch of oil?
Desperate for answers to such perplexing questions, I turned
for advice to Mr. Peak Oil himself, Michael Ruppert, and
this is what I found: "oil ... is the result of
climactic conditions that have existed at only one time in
the earth's 4.5 billion year history." I'm guessing
that that "one time" - that one golden window of
opportunity to get just the right mix of dinosaur stew -
isn't the present time, so it doesn't seem quite right, to
me at least, that oil is being generated right now.
In June 2003, Geotimes paid a visit to the Gulf of Mexico
("Raining Hydrocarbons in the Gulf"), and
the story grew yet more compelling.
http://www.geotimes.org/june03/NN_gulf.html
"Below the Gulf of Mexico,
hydrocarbons flow upward through an intricate network of
conduits and reservoirs ... and this is all happening now,
not millions and millions of years ago, says Larry Cathles,
a chemical geologist at Cornell University. "We're
dealing with this giant flow-through system where the
hydrocarbons are generating now, moving through the
overlying strata now, building the reservoirs now and
spilling out into the ocean now," Cathles says. ...
Cathles and his team estimate that in a
study area of about 9,600 square miles off the coast of
Louisiana [including Eugene Island 330], source rocks a
dozen kilometers [roughly seven miles] down have generated
as much as 184 billion tons of oil and gas -- about 1,000
billion barrels of oil and gas equivalent. "That's 30
percent more than we humans have consumed over the entire
petroleum era," Cathles say. "And that's just
this one little postage stamp area; if this is going on
worldwide, then there's a lot of hydrocarbons venting
out."
Dry oil wells spontaneously refilling? Oil generation and
migration systems? Massive oil reserves miles beneath the
earth's surface? Spontaneous venting of enormous volumes of
gas and oil? (Roberts noted that - and this isn't really
going to please the environmentalists, but I'm just
reporting the facts, ma'am - "natural seepage" in
areas like the Gulf of Mexico "far exceeds anything
that gets spilled" by the oil industry. And those
natural emissions have been pumped into our oceans since
long before there was an oil industry.)
The all too obvious question here is: how is any of that
explained by a theory that holds that oil and gas are
'fossil fuels' created in finite quantities through a unique
geological process that occurred millions of years ago?
Why do we insist on retaining an antiquated theory that is
so obviously contradicted by readily observable phenomena?
Is the advancement of the sciences not based on formulating
a hypothesis, and then testing that hypothesis? And if the
hypothesis fails to account for the available data, is it
not customary to either modify that hypothesis or formulate
a new hypothesis -- rather than, say, clinging to the same
discredited hypothesis for 250 years?
In August 2002, the journal Proceedings of the National
Academy of Sciences published a study authored by J.F.
Kenney, V.A. Kutchenov, N.A. Bendeliani and V.A. Alekseev.
The authors argued, quite compellingly, that oil is not
created from organic compounds at the temperatures and
pressures found close to the surface of the earth, but
rather is created from inorganic compounds at the extreme
temperatures and pressures present only near the core of the
earth (http://www.gasresources.net/index.htm).
As Geotimes noted ("Inorganic Origin of Oil: Much
Ado About Nothing?," Geotimes, November 2002), the
journal "published the paper at the request of Academy
member Howard Reiss, a chemical physicist at the University
of California at Los Angeles. As per the PNAS guidelines for
members communicating papers, Reiss obtained reviews of the
paper from at least two referees from different institutions
(not affiliated with the authors) and shepherded the report
through revisions." (http://www.geotimes.org/nov02/NN_oil.html)
I mention that because I happened to read something that
Michael Ruppert wrote recently that seems pertinent:
"In real life, it is called 'the proof is in the
pudding.' In scientific circles, it is called peer review,
and it usually involves having your research published in a
peer-reviewed journal. It is an often-frustrating process,
but peer-reviewed articles ensure the validity of
science." (http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/052703_9_questions.html)
It would seem then that we can safely conclude that what
Kenney, et. al. have presented is valid science, since it
definitely was published in a peer-reviewed journal. And
what that valid science says, quite clearly, is that
petroleum is not by any stretch of the imagination a finite
resource, or a 'fossil fuel,' but is in fact a resource that
is continuously generated by natural processes deep within
the planet.
Geotimes also noted that the research paper "examined
thermodynamic arguments that say methane is the only organic
hydrocarbon to exist within Earth's crust." Indeed,
utilizing the laws of modern thermodynamics, the authors
constructed a mathematical model that proves that oil can
not form under the conditions dictated by the 'fossil fuel'
theory.
I mention that because of something else I read on Ruppert's
site. Listed as #5 of "Nine Critical Questions to Ask
About Alternative Energy" is: "Most of the other
questions in this list can be tied up into this one
question: does the invention defy the Laws of
Thermodynamics? If the answer is yes, then something is
wrong." (http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/052703_9_questions.html)
Well then, Mr. Ruppert, I have some very bad news for you,
because something definitely is wrong -- with your 'Peak
Oil' theory. Because here we have a published study,
subjected to peer review (thus assuring the
"validity" of the study), that demonstrates, with
mathematical certainty, that it is actually the 'fossil
fuel' theory that defies the laws of thermodynamics. It
appears then that if we follow Ruppert's Laws, we have to
rule out fossil fuels as a viable alternative to petroleum.
Reaction to the publication of the Kenney study was swift.
First to weigh in was Nature
(Tom Clarke "Fossil Fuels Without the Fossils:
Petroleum: Animal, Vegetable or Mineral?," Nature
News Service, August 14, 2002).
"Petroleum - the archetypal fossil
fuel - couldn't have formed from the remains of dead
animals and plants, claim US and Russian researchers. They
argue that petroleum originated from minerals at extreme
temperatures and pressures. Other geochemists say that the
work resurrects a scientific debate that is almost a
fossil itself, and criticize the team's conclusions.
The team, led by J.F. Kenney of the Gas
Resources Corporation in Houston, Texas, mimicked
conditions more than 100 kilometres below the earth's
surface by heating marble, iron oxide and water to around
1500° C and 50,000 times atmospheric pressure.
They produced traces of methane, the main
constituent of natural gas, and octane, the hydrocarbon
molecule that makes petrol. A mathematical model of the
process suggests that, apart from methane, none of the
ingredients of petroleum could form at depths less than
100 kilometres."
The geochemist community, and the petroleum
industry, were both suitably outraged by the publication of
the study. The usual parade of experts was trotted out, of
course, but a funny thing happened: as much as they
obviously wanted to, those experts were unable to deny the
validity of the research. So they resorted to a very unusual
tactic: they reluctantly acknowledged that oil can indeed be
created from minerals, but they insisted that that
inconvenient fact really has nothing to do with the oil that
we use.
Showing that oil can also form without a biological origin
does not disprove [the 'fossil fuel'] hypothesis. "It
doesn't discredit anything," said a geochemist who
asked not to be named. ... "
No one disputes that hydrocarbons can form
this way," says Mark McCaffrey, a geochemist with Oil
Tracers LLC, a petroleum-prospecting consultancy in
Dallas, Texas. A tiny percentage of natural oil deposits
are known to be non-biological, but this doesn't mean that
petrol isn't a fossil fuel, he says. "
I don't know anyone in the petroleum
community who really takes this prospect seriously,"
says Walter Michaelis, a geochemist at the University of
Hamburg in Germany. "
So I guess the geochemist community is a
petulant lot. They did "concede," however, that
oil "that forms inorganically at the high temperatures
and massive pressures close to the Earth's mantle layer
could be forced upwards towards the surface by water, which
is denser than oil. It can then be trapped by sedimentary
rocks that are impermeable to oil."
What they were acknowledging, lest anyone
misunderstand, is that the oil that we pump out of
reservoirs near the surface of the earth, and the oil that
is spontaneously and continuously generated deep within the
earth, could very well be the same oil. But even
so, they insist, that is certainly no reason to abandon, or
even question, our perfectly ridiculous 'fossil fuel'
theory.
Coverage by New
Scientist of the 'controversial' journal
publication largely mirrored the coverage by Nature (Jeff
Hecht "You Can Squeeze Oil Out of a Stone,"
New Scientist, August 17, 2002).
"Oil doesn't come from dead plants
and animals, but from plain old rock, a controversial new
study claims.
The heat and pressure a hundred kilometres underground
produces hydrocarbons from inorganic carbon and water,
says J.F. Kenney, who runs the Gas Resources Corporation,
an oil exploration firm in Houston. He and three Russian
colleagues believe all our oil is made this way, and
untapped supplies are there for the taking.
Petroleum geologists already accept that some oil forms
like this. "Nobody ever argued that there are no
inorganic sources," says Mike Lewan of the US
Geological Survey. But they take strong issue with
Kenney's claim that petroleum can't form from organic
matter in shallow rocks."
Geotimes chimed in as well, quoting
Scott Imbus, an organic geochemist for Chevron Texaco Corp.,
who explained that the Kenney research is "an excellent
and rigorous treatment of the theoretical and experimental
aspects for abiotic hydrocarbon formation deep in the Earth.
Unfortunately, it has little or nothing to do with the
origins of commercial fossil fuel deposits."
What we have here, quite clearly, is a situation wherein the
West's leading geochemists (read: shills for the petroleum
industry) cannot impugn the validity of Kenney's
unassailable mathematical model, and so they have,
remarkably enough, adopted the unusual strategy of claiming
that there is actually more than one way to produce oil. It
can be created under extremely high temperatures and
pressures, or it can be created under relatively low
temperatures and pressures. It can be created organically,
or it can be created inorganically. It can be created deep
within the Earth, or it can be created near the surface of
the Earth. You can make it with some rocks. Or you can make
it in a box. You can make it here or there. You can make it
anywhere.
While obviously an absurdly desperate attempt to salvage the
'fossil fuel' theory, the arguments being offered by the
geochemist community actually serve to further undermine the
notion that oil is an irreplaceable 'fossil fuel.' For if we
are now to believe that petroleum can be created under a
wide range of conditions (a temperature range, for example,
of 75° C to 1500° C), does that not cast serious doubt on
the claim that conditions favored the creation of oil just
"one time in the earth's 4.5 billion year
history"?
A more accurate review of Kenney's work appeared in The
Economist ("The Argument Needs Oiling,"
The Economist, August 15, 2002).
" Millions of years ago, tiny animals
and plants died. They settled at the bottom of the oceans.
Over time, they were crushed beneath layers of sediment
that built up above them and eventually turned into rock.
The organic matter, now trapped hundreds of metres below
the surface, started to change. Under the action of gentle
heat and pressure, and in the absence of air, the
biological debris turned into oil and gas. Or so the story
goes.
In 1951, however, a group of Soviet scientists led by
Nikolai Kudryavtsev claimed that this theory of oil
production was fiction. They suggested that hydrocarbons,
the principal molecular constituents of oil, are generated
deep within the earth from inorganic materials. Few people
outside Russia listened. But one who did was J. F. Kenney,
an American who today works for the Russian Academy of
Sciences and is also chief executive of Gas Resources
Corporation in Houston, Texas. He says it is nonsense to
believe that oil derives from "squashed fish and
putrefied cabbages." This is a brave claim to make
when the overwhelming majority of petroleum geologists
subscribe to the biological theory of origin. But Dr
Kenney has evidence to support his argument.
In this week's Proceedings of the National Academy of
Sciences, he claims to establish that it is energetically
impossible for alkanes, one of the main types of
hydrocarbon molecule in crude oil, to evolve from
biological precursors at the depths where reservoirs have
typically been found and plundered. He has developed a
mathematical model incorporating quantum mechanics,
statistics and thermodynamics which predicts the behaviour
of a hydrocarbon system. The complex mixture of
straight-chain and branched alkane molecules found in
crude oil could, according to his calculations, have come
into existence only at extremely high temperatures and
pressures-far higher than those found in the earth's
crust, where the orthodox theory claims they are formed.
To back up this idea, he has shown that a cocktail of
alkanes (methane, hexane, octane and so on) similar to
that in natural oil is produced when a mixture of calcium
carbonate, water and iron oxide is heated to 1,500° C and
crushed with the weight of 50,000 atmospheres. This
experiment reproduces the conditions in the earth's upper
mantle, 100 km below the surface, and so suggests that oil
could be produced there from completely inorganic
sources."
Kenney's theories, when discussed at all,
are universally described as "new,"
"radical," and "controversial." In
truth, however, Kenney's ideas are not new, nor original,
nor radical. Though no one other than Kenney himself seems
to want to talk about it, the arguments that he presented in
the PNAS study are really just the tip of a very large
iceberg of suppressed scientific research.
This story really begins in 1946, just after the close of
World War II, which had illustrated quite effectively that
oil was integral to waging modern, mechanized warfare.
Stalin, recognizing the importance of oil, and recognizing
also that the Soviet Union would have to be self sufficient,
launched a massive scientific undertaking that has been
compared, in its scale, to the Manhattan Project. The goal
of the Soviet project was to study every aspect of
petroleum, including how it is created, how reserves are
generated, and how to best pursue petroleum exploration and
extraction.
The challenge was taken up by a wide range of scientific
disciplines, with hundreds of the top professionals in their
fields contributing to the body of scientific research. By
1951, what has been called the Modern Russian-Ukrainian
Theory of Deep, Abiotic Petroleum Origins was born. A
healthy amount of scientific debate followed for the next
couple of decades, during which time the theory, initially
formulated by geologists, based on observational data, was
validated through the rigorous quantitative work of
chemists, physicists and thermodynamicists. For the last
couple of decades, the theory has been accepted as
established fact by virtually the entire scientific
community of the (former) Soviet Union. It is backed up by
literally thousands of published studies in prestigious,
peer-reviewed scientific journals.
For over fifty years, Russian and Ukrainian scientists have
added to this body of research and refined the
Russian-Ukrainian theories. And for over fifty years, not a
word of it has been published in the English language
(except for a fairly recent, bastardized version published
by astronomer Thomas Gold, who somehow forgot to credit the
hundreds of scientists whose research he stole and then
misrepresented).
This is not, by the way, just a theoretical model that the
Russians and Ukrainians have established; the theories were
put to practical use, resulting in the transformation of the
Soviet Union - once regarded as having limited prospects, at
best, for successful petroleum exploration - into a
world-class petroleum producing, and exporting, nation.
J.F. Kenney spent some 15 years studying under some of the
Russian and Ukrainian scientists who were key contributors
to the modern petroleum theory. When Kenney speaks about
petroleum origins, he is not speaking as some renegade
scientist with a radical new theory; he is speaking to give
voice to an entire community of scientists whose work has
never been acknowledged in the West. Kenney writes
passionately about that neglected body of research:
"The modern Russian-Ukrainian theory
of deep, abiotic petroleum origins is not new or recent.
This theory was first enunciated by Professor Nikolai
Kudryavtsev in 1951, almost a half century ago, (Kudryavtsev
1951) and has undergone extensive development, refinement,
and application since its introduction. There have been
more than four thousand articles published in the Soviet
scientific journals, and many books, dealing with the
modern theory. This writer is presently co-authoring a
book upon the subject of the development and applications
of the modern theory of petroleum for which the
bibliography requires more than thirty pages.
The modern Russian-Ukrainian theory of deep, abiotic
petroleum origins is not the work of any one single man --
nor of a few men. The modern theory was developed by
hundreds of scientists in the (now former) U.S.S.R.,
including many of the finest geologists, geochemists,
geophysicists, and thermodynamicists of that country.
There have now been more than two generations of
geologists, geophysicists, chemists, and other scientists
in the U.S.S.R. who have worked upon and contributed to
the development of the modern theory. (Kropotkin 1956;
Anisimov, Vasilyev et al. 1959; Kudryavtsev 1959;
Porfir'yev 1959; Kudryavtsev 1963; Raznitsyn 1963;
Krayushkin 1965; Markevich 1966; Dolenko 1968; Dolenko
1971; Linetskii 1974; Letnikov, Karpov et al. 1977;
Porfir'yev and Klochko 1981; Krayushkin 1984)
The modern Russian-Ukrainian theory of deep, abiotic
petroleum origins is not untested or speculative. On the
contrary, the modern theory was severely challenged by
many traditionally-minded geologists at the time of its
introduction; and during the first decade thenafter, the
modern theory was thoroughly examined, extensively
reviewed, powerfully debated, and rigorously tested. Every
year following 1951, there were important scientific
conferences organized in the U.S.S.R. to debate and
evaluate the modern theory, its development, and its
predictions. The All-Union conferences in petroleum and
petroleum geology in the years 1952-1964/5 dealt
particularly with this subject. (During the period when
the modern theory was being subjected to extensive
critical challenge and testing, a number of the men
pointed out that there had never been any similar critical
review or testing of the traditional hypothesis that
petroleum might somehow have evolved spontaneously from
biological detritus.)
The modern Russian-Ukrainian theory of deep, abiotic
petroleum origins is not a vague, qualitative hypothesis,
but stands as a rigorous analytic theory within the
mainstream of the modern physical sciences. In this
respect, the modern theory differs fundamentally not only
from the previous hypothesis of a biological origin of
petroleum but also from all traditional geological
hypotheses. Since the nineteenth century, knowledgeable
physicists, chemists, thermodynamicists, and chemical
engineers have regarded with grave reservations (if not
outright disdain) the suggestion that highly reduced
hydrocarbon molecules of high free enthalpy (the
constituents of crude oil) might somehow evolve
spontaneously from highly oxidized biogenic molecules of
low free enthalpy. Beginning in 1964, Soviet scientists
carried out extensive theoretical statistical
thermodynamic analysis which established explicitly that
the hypothesis of evolution of hydrocarbon molecules
(except methane) from biogenic ones in the temperature and
pressure regime of the Earth's near-surface crust was
glaringly in violation of the second law of
thermodynamics. They also determined that the evolution of
reduced hydrocarbon molecules requires pressures of
magnitudes encountered at depths equal to such of the
mantle of the Earth. During the second phase of its
development, the modern theory of petroleum was entirely
recast from a qualitative argument based upon a synthesis
of many qualitative facts into a quantitative argument
based upon the analytical arguments of quantum statistical
mechanics and thermodynamic stability theory. (Chekaliuk
1967; Boiko 1968; Chekaliuk 1971; Chekaliuk and Kenney
1991; Kenney 1995) With the transformation of the modern
theory from a synthetic geology theory arguing by
persuasion into an analytical physical theory arguing by
compulsion, petroleum geology entered the mainstream of
modern science.
The modern Russian-Ukrainian theory of deep, abiotic
petroleum origins is not controversial nor presently a
matter of academic debate. The period of debate about this
extensive body of knowledge has been over for
approximately two decades (Simakov 1986). The modern
theory is presently applied extensively throughout the
former U.S.S.R. as the guiding perspective for petroleum
exploration and development projects. There are presently
more than 80 oil and gas fields in the Caspian district
alone which were explored and developed by applying the
perspective of the modern theory and which produce from
the crystalline basement rock. (Krayushkin, Chebanenko et
al. 1994) Similarly, such exploration in the western
Siberia cratonic-rift sedimentary basin has developed 90
petroleum fields of which 80 produce either partly or
entirely from the crystalline basement. The exploration
and discoveries of the 11 major and 1 giant fields on the
northern flank of the Dneiper-Donets basin have already
been noted. There are presently deep drilling exploration
projects under way in Azerbaijan, Tatarstan, and Asian
Siberia directed to testing potential oil and gas
reservoirs in the crystalline basement" ( http://www.gasresources.net/index.htm
).
It appears that, unbeknownst to Westerners,
there have actually been, for quite some time now, two
competing theories concerning the origins of petroleum. One
theory claims that oil is an organic 'fossil fuel' deposited
in finite quantities near the planet's surface. The other
theory claims that oil is continuously generated by natural
processes in the Earth's magma. One theory is backed by a
massive body of research representing fifty years of intense
scientific inquiry. The other theory is an unproven relic of
the eighteenth century. One theory anticipates deep oil
reserves, refillable oil fields, migratory oil systems, deep
sources of generation, and the spontaneous venting of gas
and oil. The other theory has a difficult time explaining
any such documented phenomena.
So which theory have we in the West, in our infinite wisdom,
chosen to embrace? Why, the fundamentally absurd 'Fossil
Fuel' theory, of course -- the same theory that the 'Peak
Oil' doomsday warnings are based on.
I am sorry to report here, by the way, that in doing my
homework, I never did come across any of that "hard
science" documenting 'Peak Oil' that Mr. Strahl
referred to. All the 'Peak Oil' literature that I found, on
Ruppert's site and elsewhere, took for granted that
petroleum is a non-renewable 'fossil fuel.' That theory is
never questioned, nor is any effort made to validate it. It
is simply taken to be an established scientific fact, which
it quite obviously is not.
So what do Ruppert and his resident experts have to say
about all of this? Dale Allen Pfeiffer, identified as the
"FTW Contributing Editor for Energy," has written:
"There is some speculation that oil is abiotic in
origin -- generally asserting that oil is formed from magma
instead of an organic origin. These ideas are really
groundless." (http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/04_04_02_oil_recession.html)
Here is a question that I have for both Mr. Ruppert and Mr.
Pfeiffer: Do you consider it honest, responsible journalism
to dismiss a fifty year body of multi-disciplinary
scientific research, conducted by hundreds of the world's
most gifted scientists, as "some speculation"?
Another of FTW's prognosticators, Colin Campbell, is
described by Ruppert as "perhaps the world's foremost
expert on oil." He was asked by Ruppert, in an
interview, "what would you say to the people who insist
that oil is created from magma ...?" Before we get to
Campbell's answer, we should first take note of the tone of
Ruppert's question. It is not really meant as a question at
all, but rather as a statement, as in "there is really
nothing you can say that will satisfy these nutcases who
insist on bringing up these loony theories." (http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/102302_campbell.html)
Campbell's response to the question was an interesting one:
"No one in the industry gives the slightest credence to
these theories." Why, one wonders, did Mr. Campbell
choose to answer the question on behalf of the petroleum
industry? And does it come as a surprise to anyone that the
petroleum industry doesn't want to acknowledge abiotic
theories of petroleum origins? Should we have instead
expected something along these lines?:
"Hey, everybody ... uhhh ... you know how we always
talked about oil being a fossil fuel? And ... uhmm ... you
know how the entire profit structure of our little industry
here is built upon the presumption that oil is a
non-renewable, and therefore very valuable, resource?
http://www.davesweb.cnchost.com/nwsltr52.html#note*
And remember all those times we talked about shortages so
that we could gouge you at the pumps? Well ... guess what,
America? You've been Punk'd!"
For the sake of accuracy, I think we need to modify Mr.
Campbell's response, because it should probably read: no one
in the petroleum industry will publicly admit giving any
credence to abiotic theories. But is there really any doubt
that those who own and control the oil industry are well
aware of the true origins of oil? How could they not be?
Surely there must be a reason why there appears to be so
little interest in understanding the nature and origins of
such a valuable, and allegedly vanishing, resource. And that
reason can only be that the answers are already known. The
objective, of course, is to ensure that the rest of us don't
find those answers. Why else would we be encouraged, for
decades, to cling tenaciously to a scientific theory that
can't begin to explain the available scientific evidence?
And why else would a half-century of research never see the
light of day in Western scientific and academic circles?
Maintaining the myth of scarcity, you see, is all important.
Without it, the house of cards comes tumbling down. And yet,
even while striving to preserve that myth, the petroleum
industry will continue to provide the oil and gas needed to
maintain a modern industrial infrastructure, long past the
time when we should have run out of oil. And needless to
say, the petroleum industry will also continue to reap the
enormous profits that come with the myth of scarcity.
How will that difficult balancing act be performed? That is
where, it appears, the 'limited hangout' concerning abiotic
oil will come into play.
Perhaps the most telling quote to emerge from all of this
came from Roger Sassen, identified as the deputy director of
Resource Geosciences, a research group out of Texas A&M
University: "The potential that inorganic hydrocarbons,
especially methane and a few other gasses, might exist at
enormous depth in the crust is an idea that could use a
little more discussion. However, not from people who take
theories to the point of absurdity. This is an idea that
needs to be looked into at some point as we start running
out of energy. But no one who is objective discusses the
issue at this time."
The key point there (aside from Sassen's malicious
characterization of Kenney) is his assertion that no one is
discussing abiotic oil at this time. And why is that?
Because, you see, we first have to go through the charade of
pretending that the world has just about run out of
'conventional' oil reserves, thus justifying massive price
hikes, which will further pad the already obscenely high
profits of the oil industry. Only then will it be fully
acknowledged that there is, you know, that 'other' oil.
"We seem to have plum run out of that fossil fuel that
y'all liked so much, but if you want us to, we could
probably find you some mighty fine inorganic stuff. You
probably won't even notice the difference. The only reason
that we didn't mention it before is that - and may God
strike me dead if I'm lying - it is a lot more work for us
to get to it. So after we charged you up the wazoo for the
'last' of the 'conventional' oil, we're now gonna have to
charge you even more for this really 'special' oil. And with
any luck at all, none of you will catch on that it's really
the same oil."
And that, dear readers, is how I see this little game
playing out. Will you be playing along?
A few final comments are in order here about
'Peak Oil' and the attacks of September 11, 2001, which
Ruppert has repeatedly claimed are closely linked. In a
recent posting, he bemoaned the fact that activists are
willing to "Do anything but accept the obvious reality
that for the US government to have facilitated and
orchestrated the attacks of 9/11, something really, really
bad must be going on." That something really, really
bad, of course, is 'Peak Oil.'
(http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/013004_in_your_face.html)
To demonstrate the dubious nature of that statement, all one
need do is make a couple of quick substitutions, so that it
reads: "for the German government to have facilitated
and orchestrated the attack on the Reichstag, something
really, really bad must have been going on." Or, if you
are the type that bristles at comparisons of Bush to Hitler,
try this one: "for the US government to have
facilitated and orchestrated the attack on the USS Maine,
something really, really bad must have been going on."
The reality is that the attacks of September 11, and the
post-September 11 military ventures, cannot possibly be
manifestations of 'Peak Oil' because the entire concept of
"Peak Oil' is meaningless if oil is not a finite
resource. I am not saying, however, that oil and gas were
not key factors behind the military occupations of
Afghanistan and Iraq. The distinction that I am making is
that it is not about need (case in point: there is certainly
nothing in Haiti that we need). It is, as always, about greed.
Greed and control -- control of the output of oil fields
that will continue to yield oil long after reserves should
have run dry.
One final note, this one directed at Michael Ruppert: I of
course accept your challenge to participate in a public
debate. However, I fail to see any benefit in limiting the
audience of that debate to a "mutually acceptable panel
of judges." I suggest we make this a truly public
debate, available to anyone who wants to follow along. The
debate, in other words, has already begun. Consider this my
opening argument.
By the way, this isn't about 'winning,' and it isn't about a
'purse.' It's about the free and open exchange of ideas and
information. It's about the pursuit of the truth, wherever
that path may lead. And it's about presenting all the
available information to readers, so that each of them can
determine, for themselves, where that truth lies. To
demonstrate my commitment to those goals, I will gladly
post, exactly as it is received, any response/rebuttal to
this missive that you should feel inclined to send my way. I
will leave it to my readers to decide who 'wins' this
debate. Will you be extending the same courtesy to your
readers?
* There is a close parallel here with the diamond industry.
It is a relatively open secret that the diamond market is an
artificial one, created by an illusion of scarcity actively
cultivated by DeBeers, which has monopolized the diamond
industry for generations. As Ernest Oppenheimer of DeBeers
said, nearly a century ago, "Common sense tells us that
the only way to increase the value of diamonds is to make
them scarce -- that is, reduce production." And that is
exactly what the company has done for decades now.
There are reportedly nearly one billion diamonds produced
every year, and that is only a fraction of what could be
produced. Diamonds are not, conventional wisdom to the
contrary, a scarce resource, and they are therefore not
intrinsically valuable. Without the market manipulation,
experts estimate that the true value of diamonds would be
roughly $30 per carat.
Interestingly enough, Soviet researchers have noted that
diamonds are the result of the same processes that create
petroleum: "Statistical thermodynamic analysis has
established clearly that hydrocarbon molecules which
comprise petroleum require very high pressures for their
spontaneous formation, comparable to the pressures required
for the same of diamond. In that sense, hydrocarbon
molecules are the high-pressure polymorphs of the reduced
carbon system as is diamond of elemental carbon." (Emmanuil
B. Chekaliuk, 1968)
So what we appear to have here are two resources, both of
which are created in abundance by natural geothermal
processes, and both of which are marketed as scarce and
valuable commodities, creating two industries awash in
obscene profits.
Dave McGowan
Comments
From Harry Mason
orbitx@bigpond.com
3-5-5
I think this guy is a tad unfair to Thomas Gold (recently
deceased) re Inorganic Oil. Gold definitely does refer to
thel Russian authors of Abiotic Oil theories.
Many of Gold's articles can be found on the web at http://www.people.cornell.edu/pages/tg21/index.html
I had a long and fascinating e-mail correspondence with Tom
Gold re the Inorganic Oil thesis and related matters over
the last few years. He always credited previous workers and
co-workers in the field.
Possibly a lack of translation from Russian to English led
to fewer Soviet researchers being credited than should have
been ???
BUT Gold also credited early British researchers in this
field who were working on the subject from the turn of the
Century - well before 1946 - something this guy does not
cover ..................
Thus theories of Abiogenic oil did not start exclusively in
the Peoples Republic of Stalin circa 1946.
BUT Soviet research certainly massively advanced the
inorganic oil thesis whilst Western science largely ignored
it.
It is incorrect to state (see below) "It appears that,
unbeknownst to Westerners, there have actually been, for
quite some time now, two competing theories concerning the
origins of petroleum." . Many western geo-scientists
are aware of the thesis - we were taught the basics at
University College London in 1965.
It is more correct to say the subject is not well funded in
the West and thus poorly disseminated in our scientific
literature - largely due to deeply instilled negative views
in the western oil industry geo-scientific community -
probably created by Rockerfella Big Oil "peer"
pressure.
The full text below re Michael Rupert and Peak Oil is worth
reading.
Rupert's angle is obviously Rockerfella spin and
largely bullshit. Oil is in tight supply because of
limited exploration expenditure AND similarly low level
expenditures on oil field and refinery development over the
last 20 years - NOT because we have no more giant fields.
But nonetheless it IS in tight supply
Best Regards,
Harry Mason
GEOLOGIST-GEOPHYSICIST
