Steve, sure there is evidence for oil's formation. The Thomas Gold theory of earth-formation deep methane is hogwash.
The oil companies don't define the price of oil. It's a competitive market and price is a function of supply and demand and cost of production with the lucky and efficient making more than the unlucky and wasteful [who go broke].
Anyway, $24 a barrel isn't a high price. High compared with what? Try coal in your car if you think oil is expensive. Or photovoltaics, or wood ethanol, or sheep fat, or sugar beet ethanol, or methane, or a little car, or motorcycle, or insulation, or walking, or a train, or anything else you can think of.
Here is how oil is formed. This is my own personal theory so you won't have seen it elsewhere, but it's the only one which fits all the facts. The idea of marine beasties being gradually buried in sedimentary layers in geosynclines is false.
This process can be watched in action. In fact, turn on tv and watch the end stage right now, with Mount Etna squirting hot larva and gas into the atmosphere.
Going back to the beginning, Peter Plankton is hanging out in the ocean, eating CO2 dissolved from the air and enjoying a spot of sunbathing, not even thinking about chasing girls or going to work in the cubicle, when along comes damn Rod Radiolarian who is feeling peckish.
Before you know it, there's a feeding frenzy going on, with various protozoans, eukaryotes and bigger beasties up to Blue Whales, Great White Sharks, Killer Whales making pigs of themselves.
Now nobody lives forever, so these beasties all die and go to heaven. Except that Osama hasn't blessed them and they haven't converted to Catholicism and the Jews don't believe it anyway, so what really happens is they don't float up into the air and off into space. They sink. Right down to the bottom of the ocean.
Down there, you can find various undertakers and slimy creatures who like the underworld, such as hagfish, L M Ericsson, crustaceans like Jay and scavenging opportunists such as me.
Well, there is a LOT to eat.
As you know, there's a lot of oil in fish, whales etc. Cod liver oil, spermaceti, Orange Roughy oil. There's also stuff in their bones. Even the crustaceans and hagfish don't live forever, so once the carbon goes down, there isn't much cycling back up to the surface. It's a bit like the stockmarket for those leveraged at the top - it's a giant black hole and all is sucked into the maw.
So, there on the bottom of the ocean you will find Radiolarian ooze and a lot of other fish/mammal/plant etc cemeteries.
Now the earth has got some tectonic processes going on to keep things interesting. What drives it are the convection currents in the molten part under the sial and sima, which form the crust on which we float around like life-rafts bobbing on the ocean.
There are long mid-ocean splits in the crust through which rise magma, which freezes into rock. The constant upwelling pushes the already risen rock out of the way, which pushes the next rock, which pushes the next all the way across the ocean floor to the long subduction zones where the crust plunges back down into the hot stuff. The ocean floor is a giant conveyor belt, spreading in various directions, carrying all the sediment along to where it heads back into the earth.
Some of the sediment is scraped off and piled up into flysch wedges, but a lot of it is subducted.
When it gets subducted, it gets hot!
The sediment contains water, carbon and anything else which has sunk into the muck, so it's a chemically active brew when it gets hot and pressured.
It gets subducted for hundreds of kilometres.
Way down there, the oily and gaseous and light stuff floats upwards and the heavy stuff sinks. There are big magma chambers in which cubic kilometres of molten gas and rock waits for the pressure to build up as more tries to squeeze in. Eventually, it gets too squashed and the top pops.
Where there isn't a lot of carbon and water etc in the brew, it's mostly molten rock and it comes out relatively gently, as with Mount Etna and especially with Hawaii, where Pahoehoe lava runs out with nary a bubble of muck in it. Where there's lots of carbon, water and read-to-turn-to-gas stuff, such as Lake Taupo in NZ, we get a really, really, big BANG. But louder than that. The stuff shoots up 10 km and then comes down in a big hurry. You can imagine how fast it comes down when you think that the Twin Towers were only a few hundred metres high and didn't weigh much. Think of 10 km high and made of rock. Cubic kilometres of molten rock. That really does make a mess.
The gases do propulsion in two ways. One is the geyser effect, where liquids under pressure get superheated then suddenly turn to gas when the pressure is taken off, expanding dramatically. The other is the burning of flammable gases when they meet oxygen. The result is a lot of noise and commotion when it involves up to 100 km3 of molten stuff.
Not all the subducted stuff goes up volcanoes. Some of it filters into sedimentary layers, cooling as it goes. When it meets an impermeable sedimentary layer, in a convex shape [with the lump upwards], or some other trap form, such as a salt dome or whatever, it forms a big puddle underground, with gas floating on top and liquid underneath.
There it sits, until it leaks out or we come along to dig it up and bring it back to life.
So, if you want to find oil, look near the edge of old or current subduction zones. Preferably near ophiolites.
You can feel the tectonic processes happening and watch them in action at the San Andreas fault. You can see hagfish eating dead whales on the ocean floor. You can watch volcanoes squirting magma and gases. You can watch oil leaking out of the ground. You can see the food chain frenzy in the ocean [you can be part of it if you go swimming in the wrong place].
Sorry for the jargon, but dictionary.com can explain the terms.
The way I got onto the theory is that a couple of decades ago, pondering a bunch of maps, I noticed ophiolites and oil deposits seemed to be good friends. So, I got to thinking as to why that would be. The sedimentary burial theory didn't make complete sense. In some places, there is too much oil for it to have got there just by being buried. It would need to have migrated to form such a big quantity. I figure a conveyor belt is a really good way to collect a LOT of oil in one place.
But this might be all a Just So story and really, it was all made yesterday and we only think there is a past. Or it's all an oil company trick and they just want the price up higher and they've bought and hidden the engines which run on water.
Which I actually had once - heh!heh!! - well, that's what the poor guy on the forecourt of the petrol station thought when I got him to put a litre of water in the fuel tank along with a litre of petrol in the little tank in the engine compartment which was just for starting the engine. He was really diffident about pouring some water into the fuel tank, but I assured him that it was true. So he did. When I went in to pay for the litre of petrol, he was ranting to the other guy how it DOES run on water and he'd put the bloody stuff in the fuel tank himself!!!
I had my fingers crossed that the water would mix with the methanol and not just sink straight to the bottom and stall me on the forecourt! The litre of petrol in the engine compartment was just for starting and warming up for a minute or two, after which a solenoid valve switched it over to methanol.
That might be where the stories of wicked oil companies hiding engines which run on water come from. Think of Peter and Rod, next time you fire up the SUV.
Life's a giggle [and a food chain ending in tectonic thrills].
Mqurice |
