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Are hydrocarbons renewable?
13.12.05 | 13:53 By Joel Bainerman
Are hydrocarbons "renewable", and if so, what does that mean for the future of the world's oil and natural gas supplies?

This question is critical due to the enormous amount of coverage the issue of "Peak Oil" is receiving from the mainstream press.

If the supply of hydrocarbons is renewable, then contrary to the conventional wisdom being touted throughout the mainstream press today, the world is NOT running out of oil.

Gimme ten gallons of dead dinosaur
Geologists have long believed that the world's supply of oil and natural gas came from the decay of primordial plant and animal matter, which, over the course of millions of years, turned into petroleum.

However 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 alternative theory claims that oil is continuously generated by natural processes in the Earth's crust.

Until his death at the age of 84 in 2004, one of the world's leading advocates for the theory that hydrocarbons are renewable was Cornell University astrophysicist, Dr. Thomas Gold, who contended that oil is not a limited resource, and that oil, natural gas and coal, are not so-called "fossil fuels".

The myth of origin

In his book, The Deep Hot Biosphere: The Myth of Fossil Fuels, Gold explained that dinosaurs and plants and the fossils from those living beings are not the origin of oil and natural gas, but rather generated from a chemical substance in the crust of the Earth.
He wrote: "Astronomers have been able to find that hydrocarbons, as oil, gas and coal are called, occur on many other planetary bodies. They are a common substance in the universe. You find it in the kind of gas clouds that made systems like our solar system. You find large quantities of hydrocarbons in them.

"Is it reasonable to think that our little Earth, one of the planets, contains oil and gas for reasons that are all its own and that these other bodies have it because it was built into them when they were born? That question makes a lot of sense. After all, they didn?t have dinosaurs and ferns on Jupiter to produce oil and gas?"

Human skulls in anthracite
He noted that human skull fossils have been found in anthracite coal in Pennsylvania. "The official theory of the development of coal will not accept that reality, since human beings were not around when anthracite coal was formed. Coal was formed millions of years ago. However, you cannot mistake the fact that these are human fossils."

"The coal we dig is hard, brittle stuff. It was once a liquid, because we find embedded in the middle of a six-foot seam of coal such things as a delicate wing of some animal or a leaf of a plant. They are undestroyed, absolutely preserved; with every cell in that fossil filled with exactly the same coal as all the coal on the outside. A hard, brittle coal is not going to get into each cell of a delicate leaf without destroying it. So obviously that stuff was a thin liquid at one time which gradually hardened."

Gold claimed that the only thing we find now on the Earth that would do that is petroleum, which gradually becomes stiffer and harder. That is the only logical explanation for the origin of coal. So the fact that coal contains fossils does not prove that it is a fossil fuel; it proves exactly the opposite. Those fossils found in coal prove that coal is not made from those fossils. Where then does the carbon base come from that produces all of this, he rhetorically asked.

Dr. Gold believed that petroleum and coal were made from materials in which heavy hydrocarbons were common components.

We know that because the meteorites are the sort of debris left over from the formations of the planets and those contain carbon in unoxidized form as hydrocarbons as oil and coal-like particles. We find that in one large class of meteorites and we find that equally on many of the other planetary bodies in the solar system. Thus it is clear that when the Earth formed it contained a lot of carbon material built into it.

Dr. Gold's theories could lead us to believe that there is so much natural gas in the earth that it is causing earthquakes in trying to escape from the Earth. If you?ll drill deep enough anywhere, you will find natural gas. It may not be in commercial quantities every time, but more than likely it will be.

Has oil "peaked" or not?

Contrarily, the statistics of the international petroleum industry establish that, far from diminishing, the net known recoverable reserves of petroleum have been growing steadily for the past fifty years. Those statistics show that, for every year since about 1946, the international petroleum industry has discovered at least five new tons of recoverable oil for every three which have been consumed.

As Professor P. Odell of the London School of Economics has put it, instead of "running out of oil," the human race by every measure seems to be "running into oil".

Says Dr. Kenney: "There stands no reason to worry about, and even less to plan for, any predicted demise of the petroleum industry based upon a vanishing of petroleum reserves. On the contrary, these considerations compel additional investment and development in the technology and skills of deep drilling, of deep seismic measurement and interpretation, of the reservoir properties of crystalline rock, and of the associated completion and production practices which should be applied in such non-traditional reservoirs".

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/pages/ArticleContent.jhtml?itemNo=657364

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