Peak Oil News and Message Boards

diemos wrote:

ROCKMAN wrote:A lot of theories come from folks that don't no shit about oil and gas production.

I don't know shit about how to extract oil and gas from the ground.

But I know that it was all created more than 100 million years ago and is finite.

As far as I'm concerned every one of the millions of bbls of oil I helped to discover had an abiotic origin. For the less evolved out there let me explain for the uptenth time: geologist don't explore for oil: we explore for potential hydrocarbon TRAPS that might contain oil. How the oil originated that could be contained in the traps is not part of the calculus. For all I know every bbl I've drilled into was created abiotically, biologically, by God or by Satan (part of his plan for to aid man in his destruction of the earth's ecology).

It made no difference in my efforts to identify and drill potential TRAPS where hydrocarbons could accumulate and ALSO BE PRODUCED FROM.

diemos wrote:

ROCKMAN wrote:A lot of theories come from folks that don't no shit about oil and gas production.

I don't know shit about how to extract oil and gas from the ground.

But I know that it was all created more than 100 million years ago and is finite.

AdamB wrote:

diemos wrote:

ROCKMAN wrote:A lot of theories come from folks that don't no shit about oil and gas production.

I don't know shit about how to extract oil and gas from the ground.

But I know that it was all created more than 100 million years ago and is finite.

Not all of it is that old. Most oil in California came from the Monterey, and it isn't more than 20 million years old, give or take.

diemos wrote:

AdamB wrote:

diemos wrote:

ROCKMAN wrote:A lot of theories come from folks that don't no shit about oil and gas production.

I don't know shit about how to extract oil and gas from the ground.

But I know that it was all created more than 100 million years ago and is finite.

Not all of it is that old. Most oil in California came from the Monterey, and it isn't more than 20 million years old, give or take.

'kay. Still not happening fast enough to keep up with what we're extracting.

Armageddon wrote:Oil fields do not fill back up

dissident wrote:

Armageddon wrote:Oil fields do not fill back up

There is one offshore field near Vietnam which supposedly "restocks". It is also in the wrong type of rock formation.

dissident wrote: The real story is that there is a proper conventional oil bearing rock source that leaks into this restocking reservoir so we have no free lunch.

https://www.researchgate.net/publicatio ... -hill_play

theluckycountry wrote:Whether they begin to refill from adjacent formations or not is hardly of interest since the process must be quite slow or we wouldn't have to drill wells on the ocean floor a mile down.

Wood is interesting. I live in a rural town, surrounded by forests. I buy split wood, delivered, by locals, a lot cheaper than you could in a city. The cheapest I can buy it is $120 for a 6x4 trailer load. The wood is actually free of course, what I'm paying for is the oil powered cutting splitting and transport to my door, as well as the profit the local needs to support his oil-based lifestyle.

I wonder how much that wood would cost me without oil's subsidies?

ROCKMAN wrote:Arm: "Oil fields do not fill back up". Well, yes and no. There is such a phenominon as secondary migration. Not very common. Complex circumstances for sure. Also better to talk about increased production from individual RESERVOIRS and not FIELDS. Many fields have shown huge increases in production after the originally discovered RESERVOIRS had been fairly well depleted. Very old (yet very true) geologist saying: one of the best places to look for a new oil field is underneath an old (and somewhat depleted) oil field. IOW deeper then original discovery.

Endless Oil?



Everybody knows that oil and gas drilled out of the earth comes from the remains of plants and animals trapped underground millions of years ago. This received wisdom so dominates our thinking that it is enshrined in the very language we use–fossil fuels. They took eons to form, and we are using them up far faster than they can be replenished.

What if the whole theory is wrong?

That’s the premise of a small but passionate band of Russian and Ukrainian contrarians. They argue that oil and gas don’t come from fossils; they’re synthesized deep within the earth’s mantle by heat, pressure and other purely chemical means, before gradually rising to the surface. Under the so-called abiotic theory of oil, finding all the energy we need is just a matter of looking beyond the traditional basins where fossils might have accumulated.

The idea that oil comes from fossils “is a myth. … We need to change this myth,” says petroleum engineer Vladimir Kutcherov, at the Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden. “All kinds of rocks could have oil and gas deposits.”

Alexander Kitchka of the Ukrainian National Academy of Sciences brashly estimates that 60% of the content of all oil is abiotic in origin, and not from fossil fuels. He says companies should drill deeper to find it.

Kitchka says oil may be found in all sorts of geological structures such as volcanic rock or deep-sea thermal vents where companies aren’t looking today.

Kutcherov points to a handful of productive oil fields in Vietnam and elsewhere that lay in hard rock such as granite. Traditional theory says oil shouldn’t be present there. Certain wells in the Gulf of Mexico have produced more oil than expected. The abiotic crowd says they are slowly being refilled from a deeper source.

The abiotic oil theory goes back centuries and includes as its prominent champions Dimitri Mendeleev, best known for inventing the periodic table. It didn’t gain much visibility in America until the late Cornell University astronomer Thomas Gold championed it in the 1980s. He said that oil contains organic compounds not because it is derived from fossils but because giant colonies of deep-earth bacteria feed on deep hydrocarbon pools way down in the mantle.

In the 1980s, he convinced the Swedish government and investors to drill four miles through solid granite in central Sweden. They eventually recovered 84 barrels of oil. Gold considered it a scientific success, even though the project was a commercial failure.

To prove that abiotic oil is possible, in 2002 Kutcherov superheated calcium carbonate, water and iron in a pressure chamber and then cranked it up to produce 30,000 times atmospheric pressure, simulating the conditions present in the earth’s mantle. Sure enough, about 1.5% of the material converted into hydrocarbons, according to results in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Most of it was methane and other gases, but about 10% was heavier oil components.

Since then, in work slated for publication, Kutcherov has shown that methane will convert into more complicated hydrocarbons under certain extreme conditions. Small amounts of natural gas that could be abiotic in origin have also been found in deep-sea vents. Kutcherov says methane is probably generated in the mantle, and depending on the conditions, it turns into heavier hydrocarbons as it bubbles up towards the surface.

Skeptics say that while traces of abiotic hydrocarbons may exist, little data support the idea of economically meaningful deposits. “Companies have been looking for oil for 100 years. If all this abiogenic stuff is there, why haven’t they found it?” asks geochemist Geoffrey Glasby, who spent nine months investigating the matter for a 2006 review paper in Resource Geology. He concluded the totality of the evidence did not support the concept.

“There is a difference between a few parts per million and tens of millions of barrels,” says Chevron geologist Barry Jay Katz, another skeptic. He notes that the theory fails to explain the wide variety of biological compounds found in oil from different parts of world. Oil from younger rocks contains compounds linked to flowering plants, but oil from older rocks formed before flowering plants existed contains only more primitive organic compounds.

“If you buy the theory, it says you will never run out of oil; there is an infinite supply, and don’t worry about anything,” says Katz. “That is not the way it seems to be working.”

American geologists might be convinced if the abiotic theorists can find big new oil fields using their methods. Kutcherov has developed a methodology for searching for deep migration channels where abiotic oil might rise to the surface. If he can raise money from investors, he hopes to begin searching for abiotic oil deposits in east Texas.