May 24 2008
Well Oil be damned…
I remember being warned by concerned schoolteachers back in the 70’s that the world I would inhabit as an adult would be one devoid of oil. New fuel sources would have to be found if modernity were to survive. Well here we are almost 40 years later and production and consumption of oil has risen since then, not fallen. How come? Well the harbingers of doom would have us believe that we really, really are in difficult times and that this really, really is the last days of oil as a fuel source. A theory developed known as ‘Peak Oil’ shows just how low the oil barrel is and we’re already scraping the bottom of it. A theory some of you will not be surprised to know I disagree with vehemently.
Whenever theories like this are developed they take into account ‘known sources’ and ‘known reserves’ - and a cursory examination of the entire field would show that we can have, should have, and those in the know DO HAVE, every reason to believe there is just as much oil lying in hidden reserves hitherto unexplored than have been consumed thus far in the history of oil consumption. Sure it’s harder to extract, which is why few exploration licences have been sought or issued but as the price per barrel continues to rise then these unexplored areas become far more viable economically to explore. Add to this the fact that some wells closed prematurely when the price slumped (rendering them unviable economically) but as the price rises, these wells once more become viable. Even allowing for this though, there’s one theory out there, which if true, would turn our understanding of oil supplies upside down and change the political landscape of the world (as well as raise huge questions of just what’s been going on for the last fifty years or so) - that theory, offered by no less a prestigious scientist as the late Thomas Gold (winner of the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society 1985) suggests that Oil is a self replenishing source and that our current beliefs as to how it forms are quite simply nonsense.
Using current scientific belief it takes millions of years for oil to develop through processes and forces involving pressure and fossilised remains of once living organisms. Gold asks ‘How can this be?’ He highlighted the fact that many known oil fields once depleted and abandoned, have ‘filled up again?’
This is not a one off phenomena - it has happened in Russia, Mexico, the USA and the Middle East. Oil fields have been completely worked out and closed up. When investigated seven or so years later they have returned to containing as much oil as was there in the initial days of drilling. He argues for an abiogenic understanding of how oil forms - or to put it another way in relation to the hydracorbons necessary in the making of oil - “Hydrocarbons are not biology reworked by geology (as the traditional view would hold) but rather geology reworked by biology.”
‘In his 1999 book, “The Deep Hot Biosphere,” He presents compelling evidence for inorganic oil formation. He notes that geologic structures where oil is found all correspond to “deep earth” formations, not the haphazard depositions we find with sedimentary rock, associated fossils or even current surface life.
He also notes that oil extracted from varying depths from the same oil field have the same chemistry – oil chemistry does not vary as fossils vary with increasing depth. Also interesting is the fact that oil is found in huge quantities among geographic formations where assays of prehistoric life are not sufficient to produce the existing reservoirs of oil. Where then did it come from?
Dr. Gold strongly believes that oil is a “renewable, primordial soup continually manufactured by the Earth under ultrahot conditions and tremendous pressures. As this substance migrates toward the surface, it is attached by bacteria, making it appear to have an organic origin dating back to the dinosaurs.” See WorldNetDaily
In an effort to show that oil can be found anywhere ‘one chooses to dig deep enough’, Gold and a team of drillers chose somewhere no oil should be, no oils should ever form as there is neither the geology or fossilised remains to allow it to happen. He chose a granite mountain in Sweden and sure enough after boring a hole seven miles deep - they struck oil.
Something ‘out there’ isn’t right.
