MOTHER OIL: A Renewable and Sustainable Resource

Because of the recent turmoil in the Middle East the price of oil is back on the front page for the first time since 2008 and in many ways it is threatening the global recovery, but why?  At the turn of the millennium we were drowning in oil and in almost Copernican fashion also entertaining the idea of adopting a new paradigm when it came to the origins of oil – in 2011 we still are and still should.

For purposes of this discussion we must suspend any objections we may harbor to the exploration for and use of oil especially when it comes to the issue of “global warming.”  When arguing whether or not oil is a renewable and sustainable resource we must free ourselves from this exhausting debate, at least for the moment. 

The Little Known Debate – Is oil abiogenic or biogenic?

We have all been taught in grade school science classes that most of our energy we use in our cars, at home, and at work come from burning what are known as fossil fuels, in other words, oil is biogenically created from the buried remains of living things.  Mikhail V. Lomonosov, the first professor of chemistry at St. Petersburg’s Acadamy of Science, is credited with being the first to come to this conclusion in 1757.  Lomonosov’s hypothesis has since become dogma in the West and is about as well established as the Earth is round and at many times as vigorously defended, however, much research posits a contrary view. 

The origin of oil according to Lomonosov’s theory or what is known as the biogenic theory rests on the premise that living matter (carbon based life forms) are over time covered by sediment similar to how a boulder is covered with sand in a river or how an animal is caught and covered in a mudslide.  This sediment and its carbon-based captive subsequently undergo intense and lengthy geological processes in order to eventually produce petroleum, hence “fossil fuel.”

Fossil fuel ultimately implies one thing – finite resource.  Sure, if we all want to wait around another 300 million years or so enough organisms will die and we’ll be able to shore up some more, but for our current purposes and in economic terms, it’s a scarce item, or so says conventional wisdom.

A preliminary search of recent news concerning this abiogenic or abiotic theory of oil yielded only a brief mention in Dag Blog buried within a review of an alarming interview with Richard Heinberg of the Post Carbon Institute.  In an archetypical breakdown of Peak Oil (a theory promulgated by M. King Herbert of Shell Oil) in it’s most eloquent and current permutation Heinberg succeeded in frightening his audience (me) with a formidable display of statistics, command, and conviction.  It was fascinating how such a seemingly innocuous man, in a 20-minute video, could crush all hope for future world growth, as I knew it.

My depression, however, was short lived once I realized Heinberg and Dag Blog omit the biogentic theory’s laudable opponents, whom if correct, undermine the premise of Heinberg’s entire argument; which is to say, we are running out of oil!  Furthermore, the peak oil theory rests upon the additional assertion we are doing effectively everything we can to find more oil when the fact is 77 percent of the world’s known oil reserves are in the hands of state-owned oil companies, not exactly the flagships of innovation or efficiency.  Additionally, the price of oil effects investment in exploration and as we saw in 2008, dollar devaluation, geopolitical turmoil, and market speculation can obfuscate the signals of supply and demand exacerbating an the already ineffectual model.

The opponents of the biogenic theory and its subsequent offspring are as follows: Dmitri Mendeleev, creator of the periodic table; Nikolai Kudrayavstev, credited with first articulating the Russian-Ukranian theory of deep, abiotic petroleum origins; Sir Robert Robinson, an organic chemist, Nobel laureate, and Presidential Medal of Freedom recipient; G.E. Boiko, VP of the Ukrainian Oil and Gas Company; A.S. Eigenson; Vladimir Porfiriev, Senior Petroleum Exploration Geologist for the USSR; Marcellin Berthelot, arguably one of the greatest chemists of all time; and among many others one Thomas Gold, “one of America’s iconoclastic scientists”, with over 60 years of study, over 280 published works from Astronomy to Zoology, and more accolades and prestigious appointments than I have time to cover here.   

The only opponent of Peak Oil and the established fossil fuel theory which Dag Blog actually mentions by name is its most public, unqualified, and controversial figure, Jerome Corsi, columnist for World Net Daily and author of both Unfit for Command, the swiftboating attack on John Kerry and The Obama Nation, a wide-ranging attack on President Obama.  Dag Blog blatantly used this unabashed partisan to set up an obvious straw man, dubbing him the “chief proponent”, while implicitly dismissing some of the most brilliant minds of the past two centuries.  These men and their arguments, however, can be found in Corsi’s book, Black Gold Stranglehold: The Myth of Scarcity and The Politics of Oil.

Considering the opponents (hardly just a doctor of political science/author leading a rag tag group of pseudo-intellectuals) and after pondering some of the opposing arguments Heinberg in hindsight almost looks as if he’s coming out of left field.  Moreover, Heinberg looks as though he has climbed in bed with two groups of scientists from big oil and big environment, both of whom have dedicated their lives to an ideology that seems to have very little to offer when it comes to overcoming some very tough contradictions or when it comes to effectively searching for oil.

Extraterrestrial Evidence for Abiotic Oil

Down to brass tax.  The late Thomas Gold provides two shocking insights among others; one, “petroleum and its component hydrocarbons are present throughout the universe…in meteorites…in interplanetary dust…and you can detect them quite abundantly on one of the moons of Saturn.  About all this there is no scientific argument.”  

In 2008 the Cassini probe found "hundreds of times more liquid hydrocarbons than all the known oil and natural gas reserves on Earth."  However, Wired Magazine made sure to admonish their audience immediately before their report on this fact:

“Before we get too excited here, let’s remember. There’s still an energy problem. Global warming, too. Nobody’s going to be importing oil substitutes from Titan anytime soon.” 

While Wired correctly referred to Titan’s abundance of hydrocarbons and not to its abundance of fossil fuels, they did not, however, explain the importance in distinguishing the two or that here on Earth we incorrectly use them interchangeably! 

The corroborating evidence found on Titan supports what many astrophysicists and astronomers already knew and poses somewhat of in interesting if not underreported contradiction to that school of thought which would have us believe oil and natural gas are finite resources derived only from ancient life here on Earth.

Mother Oil

Whichever theory one may subscribe to (abiotic or biogenic) oil is nonetheless as natural as water, which will make what I am about to tell you easier to swallow.  That “primordial soup” they were always talking about in grade school may in fact have been oil – what irony!  If the Exxon Valdez and the recent Deepwater Horizon oil spill taught us anything it was that life above ground does not do well covered in oil.  Underground, at ultra low ocean depths, and in the genesis of life, however, it is a different story entirely.  Thomas Gold’s summarized hypothesis from the Washington Post:

“Oil and gas were born out of the Big Bang [although Gold posits an alternative called the steady-state theory] and trapped in the Earth 4.5 billion years ago in randomly dispersed molecular form. But the intense heat of the Earth's volcanic core "sweats them out" of the rocks that contain them, sending them migrating outward through the porous deep Earth because they are more fluid and weigh less. In a region between 10 and 300 kilometers deep, the hydrocarbons nourish vast colonies of microbes where all of earthly life began, and where today there's a vastly greater mass of living things than exist on the surface of the planet. The migrating oil and gas ‘sweep up’ the biological wreckage of this life as they percolate upward, together with molecules of helium, all of which eventually get trapped and concentrated for periods in near-surface reservoirs where oil is usually found.”

This theory turns the fossil fuel debate on its head!  In an apparent case of oversimplified causal relation Lomonosov got it backwards.  This very different way of looking at and understanding oil and its place in our biosphere is found to be copasetic with microbes found living in oil what happened after the BP oil spill, when life was actually created as oil loving bacteria went to work cleaning up our mess.  Similar bacteria are also being used to create endless supplies of methane fuels.

Dig Deeper

Gold’s theory is buttressed and expounded upon by chemists and thermodynamicists G.E. Boiko and E.B. Chekaliuk whom studied 322 samples of oil from around the world, which culminated in a body of work spanning from 1950 to 1982.  Their calculations concerning the isomeric composition of oil has shown all natural oils are at equilibrium at temperatures and pressures far exceeding those found within the sedimentary blanket known as “source rock”, the accepted layer where oil is supposed to be created.  Boiko, therefore, concluded that the synthesis of oil according to his analysis could only take place in the upper-mantle, i.e. at depths around 40 -160 kilometers, where the proper temperatures and pressures are believed to be.  More support for this perspective comes from diamonds found in crude oil; diamonds of course require upper-mantel levels of heat and pressure to be formed.

Further support for upper-mantel formed petroleum comes from A.S. Eigenson’s studies of oil in which he discovered nickel and vanadium porphyrins in not most, but all of the petroleum deposits he studied.  According to the biogenic camp the presence of porphyrin molecules in petroleum is attributed to chlorophyll from photosynthesizing plants, and to the heme of the blood in animals, however, if that is their source these particular porphyrin molecules would need to contain the metal atoms, magnesium and iron.  No single case is known of magnesium or iron porphyrins having been found in petroleum anywhere!  Thomas Gold expounds here in a 1996 article:

“An explanation that on every occasion in all oils the original metal atoms had been exchanged for just nickel and vanadium from the rocks in their surroundings, seems extremely improbable. No explanation has been offered how plant debris would have produced the nickel and vanadium molecules, while, in the other explanation, nickel and vanadium complexes may well be expected, since these two metals are particularly prone to make organometallic compounds. This find therefore favors a deep origin, and at the same time a common origin for all oils.”

Replenishing Wells

In 1999 Eugene Island 330 was an offshore oil well in the Gulf of Mexico, which like many oil wells met its peak production level and later was expected to shut down when suddenly it started producing at nearly peak capacity.  This can be explained in two ways; one that a low pressure system was created from the depleted oil reserve thereby sucking in more oil from the surrounding area or two as Dr. Whelan of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) believes “there is a huge system of oil just migrating” deep underground which feeds many wells.  Moreover, WHOI has documented this phenomenon not only in the Gulf, but also all over the world and in geologically varying areas including the North Sea, the Niger Delta, the Mahakam Delta, the Trinidad Basin, the Taiwan Basin, and the Alaskan North Slope.

Does the Abiotic Theory Bear Fruit?

In a word, Russia.  In the 1950s, through the lens of the fossil fuel theory, Russia was ruled out as a potential energy producing power house, however, as we saw in 2009 Russia has eclipsed Saudi Arabia as the worlds leading oil producer.  The seed, which produced this energy giant is the abiotic theory of oil planted, ironically enough, by Joseph Stalin himself in arguably one of the only recorded successes of his tyrannical career, his 1947 scientific oil commission which gave rise and credence to the aforementioned theory.  Since that time 80 oil and gas fields in the Caspian district have been developed from crystalline basement (bedrock) far below the sedimentary blanket.  Moreover, exploration in the western Siberian cratonic rift has led to the development of 90 petroleum fields of which 80 produce either partly or entirely from the crystalline basement.  The list goes on…

At the very least the conventional attitude toward the origins of oil seem to be based on very old theories of which the largest oil producer in the world rejects outright.  Moreover, we have prominent scientists and much evidence to at least cast doubt on our previously held notions.  If the world is content with crisis after crisis and dreading a day without oil just over the horizon, by all means we shouldn’t investigate.  However, if we wish to live in harmony with our planet and wish to comprehensively understand its abundant gifts – we must begin and expand this crucial debate.