Outgassing

Insty links to a topic near and dear to my heart: where does oil come from? We all learned in school that it's rotten dinosaurs, everybody knows that.

When everybody knows something, look out. When I was in college, I was in a band with a PhD candidate in Physics (who was a pretty good guitar player as well). He had me over for dinner one night with the former President of the school, Dr. Sterling Colgate. Colgate has forgotten the cube of the physics I'll ever learn and was a fascinating personality.

This was in the late 70s when world oil supplies were a concern, and Dr. Colgate was adamant that the Earth, like most every other celestial body its size, was kicking out more hydrocarbons than we puny humans could ever be expected to burn. I was young and took the word of my intellectual betters. For better or worse, I have believed this ever since. The core of the planet "outgasses" small hydrocarbons and the pressures in the crust produce larger molecule versions.

I never hear this discussed at any level. Until today:

What does Gold have to do with the recent Brazil oil find? In 1999, Gold published "The Deep Hot Biosphere," a paper that postulated that coal and oil are produced not by the decomposition of organic materials, but in fact are "abiogenic" -- the product of tectonic forces; i.e., deeply embedded hydrocarbons being brought up and through the earth's mantle and transformed into their present states by bacteria living in the earth's crust.

The majority of the world’s scientists scoff at Gold's theory, and "fossil fuel" remains the accepted descriptor of oil. Yet in recent years Russia has quietly become the world's top producer of oil, in part by drilling wells as deep as 40,000 feet -- far below the graveyards of T-Rex and his Mesozoic buddies.

Is it possible that Thomas Gold was right again, and that the earth is actually still producing oil? It's tantalizing to think so. Meantime, whether or not Brazil's recent find adds support to Gold's theory, for sure it's good news for Brazilians: Government-run Petrobras is one of the world's leaders in ultra-deep offshore oil extraction, and Sugarloaf Mountain alone could transform Brazil into another Venezuela or Saudi Arabia.

I feel like a 9/11 truther or something, but I find this theory a lot more believable than the dead dinosaurs.

Oil and Energy Posted by jk at April 19, 2008 12:03 PM