THE Abiotic Oil Thread pt 2 (merged)

[rockdoc123]

The current theory is a combination of marine sediaments and the bituminization stage of coal via permeable surface pathways from surrounding areas.

just one theory that is unsubstantiated. I believe you are refering to an article that Mike Stanton put in Discovery digest awhile back where he theorized that the tar sands pre-cursor oil came from the extensive Cretaceous coal seams. Unfortunately there is no evidence to support this theory. The work that is best substantiated is that done by Martin Fowler, a geochemist at the GSC and his wife Cyndi Riedeger who was a geochemistry professor and now works at one of the larger oil companies. What these researchers found was that the biomarkers present in the Athabasca and Wabasca Lake heavy oils were similar to that noted for all Missippian and Cretaceous conventional oils. The source rock that matches those biomarkers closest is the Devonian/Mississippian organically rich shales of the Exshaw Fm. Based on burial/generation modeling it can be shown that the migration pathways for Athabasca oil were long and likely convolute, involving a number of fill/spill and remigration events.
Interestingly enough Martin Fowler is at odds with what was conventional wisdom regarding biodegration. His view (at least at one time) is that biodegradation was caused by anerobic rather than aerobic bacteria.

[OilIsMastery]

Oil was formed from the remains of microscopic animals and plants that lived before the dinosaurs ever existed.

So there were trillions of tons of microscopic organisms living in Athabasca but none in the surrounding areas?

The current theory is a combination of marine sediaments and the bituminization stage of coal via permeable surface pathways from surrounding areas.

Why so much in Athabasca and nowhere else? And if it's marine sediments, wouldn't you expect to find massive oil deposits all over the bottom of the sea floor?

[coyote]

As frustrating as OIM is, please refrain from using Ad hom's and also from just plain lashing out at him.

Right you are. Sorry.

[dbruning]

If you disturb him with facts he will go off spouting fire and brimstone. Then we can hook him up and make electricity.

So essentially Faith will solve all our problems, we just need 100 million or so fanatics we can hook wires up to.

Hey! What's Haliburton doing over in the Middle East again?
Price of copper's going up right?

Who would have thought so many years of war/death/pain/anger would just be refining the fury for maximum extraction?

*grin*

[rockdoc123]

Why so much in Athabasca and nowhere else? And if it's marine sediments, wouldn't you expect to find massive oil deposits all over the bottom of the sea floor?

The Cretaceous sandstone reservoir forms a stratigraphic trap, either due to tar mats causing a impermeable seal or stratigraphic pinchout and subsequent uplift and erosion after biodegradation.
Very similar model to the massive heavy oil deposits in Venezuela and Madagascar.

The second part of the question shows lack of understanding of how oil forms. The organic matter requires substantial heat which can only happen if the rocks are buried to great depths. By the time there has been millions of years of sediment deposited on top of the marine source rocks the sedimentary environment has gone through a number of changes. Hence a spot which was once deep marine could now be desert (a good example is the Silurian and Devonian very rich source rocks in Algeria....both of which were deposited in marine environments but did not reach maturity until Cretaceous times when the area was well above sealevel).

[OilIsMastery]

Why so much in Athabasca and nowhere else? And if it's marine sediments, wouldn't you expect to find massive oil deposits all over the bottom of the sea floor?

The Cretaceous sandstone reservoir forms a stratigraphic trap, either due to tar mats causing a impermeable seal or stratigraphic pinchout and subsequent uplift and erosion after biodegradation.
Very similar model to the massive heavy oil deposits in Venezuela and Madagascar.

Sounds like geology and not biology. What does that have to do with microscopic organisms?

[TheDude]

Sounds like geology and not biology. What does that have to do with microscopic organisms?

Heinberg wrote a good article on The Abiotic Oil Controversy.

Biomarkers

The claims for the abiotic theory often seem overstated in other ways. J. F. Kenney of Gas Resources Corporations, Houston, Texas, who is one of the very few Western geologists to argue for the abiotic theory, writes, �competent physicists, chemists, chemical engineers and men knowledgeable of thermodynamics have known that natural petroleum does not evolve from biological materials since the last quarter of the 19th century.� (12) Reading this sentence, one might assume that only a few isolated troglodyte pseudoscientists would still be living under the outworn and discredited misconception that oil can be formed from biological materials. However, in fact universities and oil companies are staffed with thousands of �competent physicists, chemists, chemical engineers and men knowledgeable of thermodynamics� who not only subscribe to the biogenic theory, but use it every day as the basis for successful oil exploration. And laboratory experiments have shown repeatedly that petroleum is in fact produced from organic matter under the conditions to which it is assumed to have been subjected over geological time. The situation is actually the reverse of the one Kenny implies: most geologists assume that the Russian abiotic oil hypothesis, which dates to the era prior to the advent of modern plate tectonics theory, is an anachronism. Tectonic movements are now known to be able to radically reshuffle rock strata, leaving younger sedimentary oil- or gas-bearing rock beneath basement rock, leading in some cases to the appearance that oil has its source in Precambrian crystalline basement, when this is not actually the case.

Thanks for the replies, all.

[OilIsMastery]

Russia is the second largest producer of petroleum in the world at 9.6 million barrels per day. I guess it's a mystery to Heinberg how they discover oil in Russia when everyone there thinks it's abiotic.

[TheDude]

During the latter half of the 20th century, with advances in geophysics and geochemistry, the vast majority of scientists lined up on the side of the biotic theory. A small group of mostly Russian scientists�but including a tiny handful of Western scientists, among them the late Cornell University physicist Thomas Gold�have held out for an abiotic (also called abiogenic or inorganic) theory.

A list of them is at the Wiki article.

The abiotic theory is intriguing, but it simply doesn't pay off - we see no evidence of viable refilling of reservoirs, and just drilling in any old formation doesn't yield results - it's still best to drill in anticlines and the like. Not that there's much hope of finding more supergiants, either. If you want to persist in insisting in its validity, go right ahead. Won't fill any tankers.

Many oil source rocks are undeniably biotic in origin, begging the question of why you need a deep earth explanation for the material they contain.

[Madpaddy]

dbruning wrote,

So essentially Faith will solve all our problems, we just need 100 million or so fanatics we can hook wires up to.

So instead of Kilowatts we can have Mullahwatts
Jewles instead of Joules
etc.

[OilIsMastery]

During the latter half of the 20th century, with advances in geophysics and geochemistry, the vast majority of scientists lined up on the side of the biotic theory. A small group of mostly Russian scientists�but including a tiny handful of Western scientists, among them the late Cornell University physicist Thomas Gold�have held out for an abiotic (also called abiogenic or inorganic) theory.

A list of them is at the Wiki article.

The abiotic theory is intriguing, but it simply doesn't pay off - we see no evidence of viable refilling of reservoirs, and just drilling in any old formation doesn't yield results - it's still best to drill in anticlines and the like. Not that there's much hope of finding more supergiants, either. If you want to persist in insisting in its validity, go right ahead. Won't fill any tankers.

Many oil source rocks are undeniably biotic in origin, begging the question of why you need a deep earth explanation for the material they contain.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiogenic_petroleum_origin

widely accepted in Russia

[pstarr]

It's so much fun humoring this little boy oilismastery, watching him develop his adult superego and geologic wisdom. Eventually we will set oilismastery free like the angry little dove that he is, to fly over the land and promulgate the peak oil story and bring fresh novi and adventurers back to us.

[rockdoc123]

Sounds like geology and not biology. What does that have to do with microscopic organisms?

The reason there is so much oil in Athabasca is it migrated from elsewhere and the geologic conditions were perfect for a massive accumulation. It has nothing to do with microscopic organisms. The Mississippian shales of the Exshaw have incredible total organic carbon content and are very extensive. Easily enough volume of source rock to have created the amount of oil present and lots more. God save us from armchair scientists.

I suggest you find yourself a primer on petroleum geology, I often recommend Petroleum Formation and Occurrence by Tissot and Welte or Petroleum Geochemistry and Geology by Hunt.

A search on PO forums should lead you to a discussion I had earlier that outlines why abiotic theory falls apart and the evidence for biogenic origins of oil. There was a conference not that long ago (AAPG) held in Calgary that addressed the whole abiotic theory. It had been put to bed many years ago by all but a few geochemists (all whom happen to be in Russia) and the conference served to review advances in the science over the past decade or so that helped to bolster the biogenic origin theory. The very fact that we can produce complex hydrocarbons in laboratory conditions from source rock and the direct comparison of biomarkers, source to accumulation are pretty compelling reasons on their own.

[Keith_McClary]

Oil was formed from the remains of microscopic animals and plants that lived before the dinosaurs ever existed.

So there were trillions of tons of microscopic organisms living in Athabasca but none in the surrounding areas?

The current theory is a combination of marine sediaments and the bituminization stage of coal via permeable surface pathways from surrounding areas.

Why so much in Athabasca and nowhere else? And if it's marine sediments, wouldn't you expect to find massive oil deposits all over the bottom of the sea floor?

Weren't these shallow inland seas in tropical conditions - not oceans?

[Keith_McClary]

Oil was formed from the remains of microscopic animals and plants that lived before the dinosaurs ever existed.

So there were trillions of tons of microscopic organisms living in Athabasca but none in the surrounding areas?

The current theory is a combination of marine sediaments and the bituminization stage of coal via permeable surface pathways from surrounding areas.

Why so much in Athabasca and nowhere else? And if it's marine sediments, wouldn't you expect to find massive oil deposits all over the bottom of the sea floor?

So, if hydrocarbons are abiotic, then what happened to the remains of all those bacteria and dinos and trilobites and their poop, not to mention plants?

[BigTex]

If I dig a hole 2 feet wide and 4 feet deep in an area that has groundwater and I fill up my hole with water, place a piece of clear plastic over it and stick a straw in it that reaches almost to the bottom of the hole, I will have an abundant source of water until I suck all of the water I put in the hole out. I will then see a gradual accumulation of water in the hole as the groundwater condenses on the plastic and drips to the bottom of the hole. The quantity of water that will be available by this process will, however, be trivial compared to the amount of water I had when the hole was full.

Even if oil were abiotic, isn't it like the water condensing on the plastic in my example? It's not enough to mitigate our problems to any meaningful extent, so does it really matter where it comes from?

In my example, the water was not being created, it was just migrating from one area to another. I suspect that any oil that appears to be "new" is ultimately just migrating from one area to another as well.

Perhaps we could carbon date some suspected abiotic oil and see how old it is.

Wouldn't the abiotic oil argument apply to any natural resource? That is, given the right conditions, any natural resource could be replenished. For example, if we had the right materials, temperature and pressure, diamonds could be created and flow from the earth like a fountain. It is, however, the uncommon convergence of the right conditions for their formation that contribute to a diamond's value. Isn't the same true of oil? There could be new oil in the process of being created all the time, but the fact is the conditions for the creation of good oil are so unusual that it just doesn't happen very often.

Perhaps, then, it's correct to say that the abiotic oil theory could be correct, though the probability of it happening right now when we happen to be depleting millions of years of accumulated oil is VERY low.

In the end, though, if the reservoirs are not refilling at a rate that is either non-trivial, or at least predictable, I don't see that it really matters what's causing it, if it doesn't help with our problem of declining production in the face of increasing demand.

[Tanada]

Perhaps we could carbon date some suspected abiotic oil and see how old it is.

Radioactive dating is only valid for 10 half lives of the respective isotope, in this case C-14. That gives you a window of about 4400 to about 44000 years you can date, anything older you need a different method.

[BigTex]

Perhaps we could carbon date some suspected abiotic oil and see how old it is.

Radioactive dating is only valid for 10 half lives of the respective isotope, in this case C-14. That gives you a window of about 4400 to about 44000 years you can date, anything older you need a different method.

I figured if it were that simple someone would have already done it.

Thanks for the info, though.

[skeptik]

Perhaps we could carbon date some suspected abiotic oil and see how old it is.

and your other problem is an oxymoron in that statement. If the oil is abiotic, carbon dating wouldn't work, or if it did give a result then the oil by definition wouldn't be abiotic - carbon dating only works on preserved organic remains.

[BigTex]

Perhaps we could carbon date some suspected abiotic oil and see how old it is.

and your other problem is an oxymoron in that statement. If the oil is abiotic, carbon dating wouldn't work, or if it did give a result then the oil by definition wouldn't be abiotic - carbon dating only works on preserved organic remains.

Wait, run that by me again.

Assuming that the oil we are trying to carbon date is abiotic, why couldn't we carbon date it, assuming it were within the carbon dating period? (like some REALLY fresh abiotic oil)

Are you saying that the process that organic matter goes through in the process of being converted to oil destroys the ability to measure its age by carbon dating (assuming we were within the carbon dating window)?

Oh wait, I think I see what you are saying...abiotic oil is not supposed to coming from organic material in the first place. Okay, got it.

Abiotic oil is seeping out of the great (non-organic) tit of of Mother Nature.