| Dear Reader,For this edition of my free newsletter I have decided to share with you some personal intellectual history. Namely, how I realized that I was completely wrong about accepting the idea that hydrocarbons–oil, gas and even coal–were a depleting, finite resource that was at or near its “peak” in production worldwide.
I want to give here a personal account of the change in my own belief about the genesis of hydrocarbons as I feel it will become increasingly important in the near future to grasp precisely what the Oil Game of the Big Four Anglo-American oil giants–ExxonMobil, Chevron, Shell and BP–is truly about. It’s about creating myths, lies and ultimately oil wars based on those myths and lies.
It was during the period in late 2002 as it became clear that the Bush-Cheney US Administration was determined to destroy Iraq and depose Saddam Hussein. How a US government could risk a potential break with its European and other major allies for any real or imagined threat from Iraq at that point puzzled me greatly. There must be a deeper ground, I told myself.
Then a friend sent me an article from a now-defunct website, From The Wilderness, founded by the late Mike Ruppert. The article laid out a major argument as to how the volume of oil in the ground was finite and disappearing rapidly. It argued that the single largest oil field in history, Ghawar in Saudi Arabia, was so depleted that it needed water injection of millions of barrels daily to get an ever declining output of crude oil. They argued that Russia was past the “peak” in its oil. They illustrated their notion with the famous Gaussian bell curve graph. The world, after more than a Century in the hydrocarbon era, had consumed so much oil that we were near to “absolute peak.” Or so they claimed.
Absolute Peak?
I dug deeper, found other articles on the peak oil theme. It seemed to offer an explanation for the mad Iraq War. After all, Iraq according to estimates had the world’s second largest undeveloped reserves of oil after Saudi Arabia. If oil was in such short supply, it would offer an explanation.
I decided I should go deeper on such a pivotal question as the future of world oil and its potential impact on the very questions of war and peace, world prosperity or famine.
I went to the annual conference of something calling itself the Association for Study of Peak Oil (ASPO), held in May 2004 in Berlin. There I met the gurus of Peak Oil–Colin Campbell, a retired Texaco geologist whose research on well production had given the peak oil movement a seeming scientific foundation; Matt Simmons, a Texas oil banker who had writen a book titled Twilight in the Desert claiming Ghawar was well past peak. Mike Ruppert was also there as was peak oil author Richard Heinberg.
Far from being treated to a high level scientific demonstration of the geophysics behind peak oil, however, I was gravely disappointed to be witness to bitter, acrimonious verbal battles between peak oil critics such as an energy expert from the Paris International Energy Agency and various peak oil advocates who managed to lob mere ad hominem attacks on the Paris speaker rather than lay out serious science.
I decided to make a meeting with the then-President of ASPO International, Swedish atomic physicist, Kjell Aleklett, a few weeks later, at his University in Uppsala, Sweden, in an attempt to get a deeper scientific argument for Peak Oil. There Aleklett treated me to his latest slide show. He argued that, as oil was a fossil fuel, we knew, through study of plate tectonics, where all major oil deposits were to be found. Then, citing depletion of production in the North Sea, in Ghawar, Texas and a few other spots, Aleklett claimed, “voila! The case is proven.” For me it was anything but proven.
An alternative view
At that point, presented by Aleklett with what could only be described as a slide show loaded with unproven assertions, I began to question my earlier conviction about peak oil. Months before, a German researcher friend had sent me a paper by a group of Russian geophysicists on something they called “abiotic origins” of hydrocarbons. I had filed it for future reading. Now I opened it and read. I was impressed, to put it mildly.
As I searched more translations of the Russian scientific abiotic papers, I dug deeper. I learned of the highly-classified Soviet era research begun in the 1950s at onset of the Cold War. Stalin had given a mandate to the leading Soviet geo-scientists to, simply put, insure that the USSR was entirely self-sufficient in oil and gas. They should not repeat the fatal error that had contributed to Germany’s losing two world wars–lack of oil self-sufficiency.
Being serious scientists, they took nothing for granted. They began their work with an exhaustive search of world scientific literature for rigorous proof of the genesis of hydrocarbons, beginning with the accepted fossil fuel theory. To their shock, the found not one serious scientific proof in the entire literature.
I then read of the cross-disciplinary researches by academics such as Professor V.A. Krayushkin, head of the Department of Petroleum Exploration in the Institute of Geological Sciences of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences in Kiev, one of the leading abiotic scientists.
Krayushkin presented a paper following the end of the Cold War to a 1994 Santa Fe, New Mexico conference of DOSECC (Drilling, Observation and Sampling of the Earth’s Continental Crust). There Krayushkin presented his researches of the Dnieper-Donets region of Ukraine. Traditional mainstream geology would have argued that that region would be barren of oil or gas. Traditionally-trained geologists had argued it senseless to drill for oil or gas there because of the complete absence of any “source rock” — the special geological formations which, according to Western geological theory, were the unique rocks from which hydrocarbons were generated or were capable of being generated – presumably, the only places where oil could be found, hence the term “source.”
What Krayushkin presented to the disbelieving audience of American geologists and geo-scientists went against their entire oil genesis training. Krayushkin argued that the oil and gas discoveries in the Ukraine basin came from what geologists called ‘crystalline basement,’ deep rocks where Western geological theory claimed oil and gas (which they termed ‘fossil fuels,’) could not be found. No dinosaur fossils nor tree remains could have been buried so deep, the Western theory went.
Yet the Russians had found oil and gas there, something tantamount to Galileo Galilei telling the Holy Inquisition that the Sun — and not the Earth — was the center of our system. According to one participant, the audience was not at all amused by the implications of Russian geophysics.
The speaker from Kiev went on to tell the scientists at Santa Fe, New Mexico that the Ukrainian team’s efforts to look for oil where conventional theory insisted no oil could be found had, in fact, yielded a bonanza in commercial oil and gas fields.
He described in detail the scientific tests they had conducted on the discovered petroleum to evaluate their theory that oil and gas originated not near the surface – as conventional fossil fuel theory assumes – but rather at great depth in the Earth, some two hundred kilometers deep. The tests confirmed that the oil and gas had indeed originated from great depth.
The speaker clearly explained that the Russian and Ukrainian scientists’ understanding of the origin of oil and gas was as different from what the Western geologists had been taught as was day from night.
More shocking to the audience was Krayushkin’s report that during the first five years of exploration of the northern part of the Dneiper-Donets Basin in the early 1990’s, a total of 61 wells had been drilled, of which 37 were commercially productive, a success rate of more than 60%. For an oil industry where a 30% success rate was typical, 60% was an impressive result. He described, well-by-well, the depths, oil flows and other details. [1]
Several of the wells were at a depth of more than four kilometers, a depth of roughly 13,000 feet into the Earth and some produced as much as 2600 barrels of crude oil a day, worth almost $3 million per day at 2011 oil prices.
Following such reading, I came into personal contact with one of the leading Russian abiotic scientists, Vladimir Kutcherov, then a professor at the Swedish Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden’s ETH or MIT. We met several times and he tutored me in the confirmed deep earth origins of all hydrocarbons. Not from dead dinosauer detritis and biological remains. Rather oil is being constantly generated from deep in the core of the Earth in the giant nuclear oven we call the core. Under enormous temperature and pressure, the primal methane gas is forced to the surface through what they term migration channels in the Earth’s mantle. [2] Indeed, Kutcherov demonstrated that existing “depleted” oil wells, left capped for several years, had been proven to “refill” with new oil from deep under. Depending on the elements the methane migrates through on its upwards journey, it remains gas, becomes crude oil, tar or coal.
The implications of the deep Earth genesis of hydrocarbons were profound and forced me to change my previously-accepted belief. I read further the fascinating geophysical theories of the brilliant German scientist, Alfred Wegener, the true discoverer of what in the 1960s was dubbed Plate Tectonics. I came to realize that our world is, as the Dutch oil economist, Peter O’dell famously put it, “not running out of oil, but running into oil.” Everywhere, from offshore Brazil to Russia, to China, to the Middle East. I wrote what became one of my most read online articles, “Confessions of an Ex-Peak Oil Believer,” in 2007. [3]
Indeed I realized that the entire foundations of Western petroleum geology was a kind of religion. Rather than accept the Divine Birth, Peak Oil “church-goers” accepted the Divine Fossil Origins. No proof needed, only belief. To this day there exists not a single serious scientific paper proving the fossil genesis of hydrocarbons. It was posited in the 1760’s as an untested hypothesis, by Russian scientist Mikhail Lomonosov. It has served the American oil industry, especially of the family Rockefeller, to build an immense fortune based on a myth of oil scarcity.
Today, clearly the new US Administration under a President Trump, with his ExxonMobil Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, is returning to the era of Big Oil after eight years of Obama and alternative strategies. If our world is to avoid yet more carnage and unnecessary wars over bountiful oil, it would be important to study the true history of our Age of Oil. In 2012 I published a book based on this work titled Myths, Lies and Oil Wars. For those interested, I’m convinced you will find it a useful alternative. |
dave thompson on Fri, 3rd Feb 2017 2:40 pm
OH BOY! Endless oil from the earths core, what’s not to like.
penury on Fri, 3rd Feb 2017 3:04 pm
Pure ignorance (assumed by the author) on the part of the reader may result in someone believing this BS. If you find anyone who believes in this, back away slowly, and do not make eye contact, when out of range-run likie hell.
onlooker on Fri, 3rd Feb 2017 3:08 pm
Apes living in their delusion filled world.
dissident on Fri, 3rd Feb 2017 3:55 pm
Abiotic oil welling up from the deep earth is one of the dumbest theories ever. The heat at those depths would crack this oil to natural gas and it would be the natural gas that would seep to the surface. We are talking about a slowly evolving system and not abiotic oil volcanoes which could allow the escape of this fictional elixir before it gets decomposed.
There is abiotic gas in “small” quantities produced by mineral chemistry but this is not commercially relevant. We have enough physical evidence that the oil we extract including the bitumen is biogenic based on its chemical composition. Abiotic oil would lack such a chemical profile.
It possible that magma exerts thermal redistribution of conventional oil from one location to another depending on the local geology. We have oil extraction from igneous rock formations off the coast of Vietnam (White Tiger oilfield is one case). This is not evidence of abiotic oil. It is evidence that fractured granite formations can accommodate commercially viable oil deposits.
Anonymous on Fri, 3rd Feb 2017 4:35 pm
Abiotic oil = creationism for oil loving cornucopians.
Apneaman on Fri, 3rd Feb 2017 5:02 pm
Yep, the Alberta tar sands is a half trillion dollar feint to get ya to think they saving the good stuff for later. 1 tire on one of those giant sand hauling dump trucks is $40,000, but “they” are more than willing to pay for thousands of those over decades and all the rest of that massive infrastructure for the biggest mining operation in human history just to fool you Bill.
Gosh darn Pa! They dun fooled me again.
Harquebus on Fri, 3rd Feb 2017 6:09 pm
Even if true, can this process produce oil in the quantities currently extracted. If not then, we are in the predicament.
efarmer on Fri, 3rd Feb 2017 6:46 pm
I was asked by an abiotic wildcatter to help him get his rig working again so he could continue to explore for the stuff. Turned out he just had a paperclip in the keyboard of the rig, and once removed, the rig was laying down thousands of feet of drill text in no time. 🙂
Alice Friedemann on Fri, 3rd Feb 2017 7:21 pm
Zero credibility, Engdahl is a nutcase, part of the LaRouche movement. And poor old Mother Earth isn’t producing as much oil for civilization to devour as is being consumed, so even if there were a shred of truth to what he says, it doesn’t matter
bahamased on Fri, 3rd Feb 2017 8:06 pm
So we should go back and re-drill Spindletop as it should be refilled by now
” oil production from the field peaked in 1902 at 17,400,000 barrels (2,770,000 m3), but by 1905 production had declined 90% from the peak.[11]”
Keith McClary on Fri, 3rd Feb 2017 9:13 pm
If oil were oozing up at the current rate of production we would literally be up to our armpits in about 100,000 years (i.e., enough oil to cover the entire surface of the Earth to a depth of 1m). I think we would notice if that were happening.
Sissyfuss on Fri, 3rd Feb 2017 9:42 pm
If as they say, the name makes the man then would somebody please “F” William Engdahl, preferably in the ear.
Apneaman on Fri, 3rd Feb 2017 9:57 pm
Sissyfuss, I’d do it, but I’m not sure if my dick is big enough. I measured it and it’s only 3 3/4 inches. I read online that it’s below average, but most of the girls I’ve been with seemed to like that wide.
makati1 on Fri, 3rd Feb 2017 10:31 pm
Ap! I haven’t laughed so hard since … well, I don’t know when. What a punch line! ^_^
Apneaman on Fri, 3rd Feb 2017 10:35 pm
Mak, I’m feeling a little goofy tonight.
Wonder why?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WeYsTmIzjkw
makati1 on Sat, 4th Feb 2017 12:04 am
Ap, Good music! Been there, but I got thru the 70s and never touched the stuff. Then I had two black roomies after my divorce and they were into it. We had some good times. Got a buzz but I still prefer good old alcohol. lol
Go Speed Racer on Sat, 4th Feb 2017 12:55 am
Yes. It’s true. This matches up with
what the Sunday preacher told me. He drives
a great big greyhound bus, converted into
a motorhome travelling around
the state, preaching the Gospel of Jesus.
He explained Jesus refills the oil well
exactly as much as we take out of it.
That’s why we will never run out of oil.
sinnycool on Sat, 4th Feb 2017 1:24 am
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I’m not sure about the former.
Best hopes,
Albert.
Cloggie on Sat, 4th Feb 2017 4:55 am
Fascinating, all these sarcastic comments here from people who merely repeat what they have been taught at school.
There is only one person on this board who DID spend his life staring at geological data sheets for decades on end and that is Rockman. And guess what, he supports the abiotic theory as well.
Heinberg, Ruppert, Aleklett… all oil-laymen with unfounded opinions and an agenda of wanting to tell tall tales to a global public that loves to be entertained with horror stories. Or greenies (Heinberg) who smell a change to torpedo industrial civilization.
Bye bye peak oil, nice having met you.
They should not repeat the fatal error that had contributed to Germany’s losing two world wars–lack of oil self-sufficiency.
Oil had nothing to do with WW1, but was indeed crucial for WW2.
Both WW1 and WW2 showed that Germany, the core of the white race in terms of backbone and competence, can beat 3 out of 4 {Britain, France, Russia, USA} but not 4 out of 4. Or rather it can, if it takes out 1 by 1. But this stupid Italian “ally” began invading Albania and Greece early 1941 and infringe Greek neutrality, providing the pretext for Britain to land in Thessaloniki, with no other purpose than to threaten and bomb Ploesti/Romania, which was the only gas station the Germans had. This move forced the angry Germans (angry with the Italians) to invade Yugoslavia and Greece in order to remove that threat, caused by their Italian “ally”. That exercise costed Germany three valuable months and caused a crucial delay of the German attack against the USSR, that was in a state of full mobilization while preparing for the assault against Europe. Operation Barbarossa was nothing but a preemptive attack, where in reality it was the USSR that had began to betray the German-Soviet non-aggression agreement of September 1939, proposed by the Soviets, which was nothing but a trap to lure the Germans into Poland by coming to the aid of their beleaguered German countrymen, forced to live in Versailles Poland and persecuted by the Poles (Allied lies: ” Germany started WW2″). Thanks to Barbarossa we in the Netherlands were spared the fate of becoming overrun by the Soviets (thank you Dolfie) and we were stuck with the lesser evil of assorted inconveniences such as there are: Americans, British and their Canadians.
The other German “ally” Japan was crucial in providing the pretext for the US to enter WW2, against the will of the American population, via the US engineered Japanese attack against Pearl Harbor. If Germany had not been allies with Italy and Japan it might even have won the war and Britain, France and the US might not have been destroyed by mass immigration, engineered by those who really organized and won WW2.
Midnight Oil on Sat, 4th Feb 2017 5:02 am
I can see these guys urging for nuclear explosion underground to “free” oil so it can be brought to the surface….you laugh
Sorry…the Russians already tried it….
Why not?
dissident on Sat, 4th Feb 2017 7:29 am
@Cloggie
Rockman is in the oil extraction business and not in biogeochemistry research. He is not qualified to pontificate on abiotic oil because of his job. Real scientists with the necessary knowledge and IQ have looked at this issue and have determined the facts. Abiotic oil believers clearly have no room for facts in their minds. Just faith.
dissident on Sat, 4th Feb 2017 7:32 am
Abiotic oil is one of the nut job theories that came out from Stalin’s USSR. Read up on the Lysenko and “false science”. During Stalin’s rule the USSR was loony tunes land in terms of science with all sorts of quackery being promoted and real science suppressed.
joe on Sat, 4th Feb 2017 7:56 am
Who cares where oil came from. Its still costing more and more to extract. It takes more of our energy now to get the same amount. It follows the law of diminishing marginal utility
http://www.investopedia.com/terms/l/lawofdiminishingutility.asp
Easy oil peaked, the price spiked, tight oil came on, we have oversupply now with low demand which has the banksters out manipulating markets and nobody really wants to buy extra oil during a time of tightening national budgets. Its recipe for fun times ahead. Saudi prayed to God for Trump to pick on Iran.
Cloggie on Sat, 4th Feb 2017 8:09 am
Rockman is in the oil extraction business and not in biogeochemistry research. He is not qualified to pontificate on abiotic oil because of his job. Real scientists with the necessary knowledge and IQ have looked at this issue and have determined the facts. Abiotic oil believers clearly have no room for facts in their minds. Just faith.
Russians were the first to drill for oil in Baku (1840s) and are currently the largest oil producers.
And believe in the abiotic theory.
If oil would really be of organic origin, its presence should universal on this planet.
It isn’t.
Q.E.D.
rockman on Sat, 4th Feb 2017 8:59 am
H – “Even if true, can this process produce oil in the quantities currently extracted.” And that’s actually not the critical question. What’s important is where the oil (abiotic or otherwise) has accumulated. Which is exactly how I shut the abiotic fanatics down: the 40+ year experienced petroleum geologist, the Rockman, believes all oil has an abiotic origin. End of debate. The problem facing the world is the increasing difficulty (and expense) of finding the yet discovered abiotic oil accumulations. Yes: the world is fast approaching PAO…Peak Abiotic Oil. LOL.
And refilling depleted fields? Obviously too slow in a human time frame. For instance:
bahamased – “So we should go back and re-drill Spindletop as it should be refilled by now”. Guess what: the field is still producing. Not a lot but there are still wells completed in the reservoirs that began producing over 100 years ago. And guess what else: drilling in Spindletop field has never stopped. Granted not a lot of new wells but enough to find any new abiotic oil that might have migrated there since the discover of the field.
In fact, as recently as 2013: “Hard-hatted roughnecks returned to Spindletop this week, aiming to make another historic strike on the storied grounds. “This is one of the best Christmas presents I have ever had, getting this well spudded on the 22nd of December, 2013.” said Bud Tippens, a landman who has worked on the Southeast Texas project since 1999. Once that pipe reaches 10,000 feet a team of geologists will arrive to begin analyzing the findings to see if there really are deep undiscovered pockets of oil and gas at the Spindletop dome, site of the huge discovery in 1901 that transformed the oil industry and American life.”
And guess who was one of those geologists? None other then your very own ROCKMAN!!! Yes, my company bought an interest in that well from Bud and was the operator. Unfortunately it was a dry hole…as was the sidetracked second well. And then Bud shifted south and drilled a 3rd dry hole. The Rockman passed on that one: two misses chasing those elusive remaing abiotic oil accumulations was enough. LOL.
Intosh on Fri, 10th Feb 2017 12:22 pm
“If oil would really be of organic origin, its presence should universal on this planet.”
Doesn’t make any sense. Then again, you need to not make sense to believe this theory.
Mike on Fri, 10th Feb 2017 4:27 pm
If the Ukrainian tests were so successful, is Ukraine now a major oil and gas producer? If so I must have missed that!
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