Peter, I was going to hold back from replying to this garbage, but cannot bite my tongue (or fingers, as the case may be) any longer.
That article on Russian abiotic oil is pure fantasy and full of holes.
The author clearly hasn't a clue what he is talking about.
Here are a few choice excerpts for your amusement, from a petroleum geologist's (that's me) perspective:
"Biological origin is central to Peak Oil theory, used to explain why oil is only found in certain parts of the world where it was geologically trapped millions of years ago. That would mean that, say, dead dinosaur remains became compressed and over tens of millions of years fossilized and trapped in underground reservoirs perhaps 4-6,000 feet below the surface of the earth."
The first sentence is okay.
No respectable petroleum scientist thinks that oil comes from squashed dinosaurs. LMAO
If any organic matter, be it a dinosaur or a tree, becomes fossilized, that essentially means it has turned to stone. The organic matter has been replaced with minerals and preserved the shape of the original object. Solid stone. No oil. Get the picture? The author certainly doesn't!
"An entirely alternative theory of oil formation has existed since the early 1950’s in Russia, almost unknown to the West. It claims conventional American biological origins theory is an unscientific absurdity that is un-provable. They point to the fact that western geologists have repeatedly predicted finite oil over the past century, only to then find more, lots more."
Say what?
The biological origins of oil formation have been proven scientifically, both chemically and practically, time and time again. Modern analogs (living reefs, rivers, estuaries, deltas) have been used repeatedly, and with great success, to successfully find oil deposits.
"Not only has this alternative explanation of the origins of oil and gas existed in theory. The emergence of Russia and prior of the USSR as the world’s largest oil producer and natural gas producer has been based on the application of the theory in practice."
Complete and utter bunk.
Russia's oil fields produce conventional oil and gas, largely found by Western oil companies using western oil know-how. I know many, many western oilpatch folk who work in Russia. It is all conventional oil. Nothing abiotic about it.
"In 1956, Prof. Vladimir Porfir’yev announced their conclusions: ‘Crude oil and natural petroleum gas have no intrinsic connection with biological matter originating near the surface of the earth. They are primordial materials which have been erupted from great depths.’ "
Huh?
The only thing erupting from great depths is magma, H2S and other noxious gases. Volcanic eruptions also pick up a lot of other things from shallow depths, as molten magma moves upwards, such as ground water. Try putting magma in your gas tank!
"They argued that oil is formed deep in the earth, formed in conditions of very high temperature and very high pressure, like that required for diamonds to form. ‘Oil is a primordial material of deep origin which is transported at high pressure via ‘cold’ eruptive processes into the crust of the earth,’ "
This just gets better and better!
The above is impossible for several reasons.
1) If the pressure and temperature are high enough to form diamonds from carbon atoms, then any hydrocarbon molecules present in that environment will do exactly that - form diamonds, not oil.
2) "Western oil theory" and geochemistry have proven, with controlled experiments, empirical data and a vast amount of physical drilling data, that hydrocarbon chains form under very specific pressure and temperatures, commonly called the oil window. Google it for details.
3) What the f**k is a "cold eruptive process"? Anyone ever seen a cold eruption on Earth? LMAO
"The Russian company Petrosov drilled in Vietnam’s White Tiger oilfield offshore into basalt rock some 17,000 feet down and extracted 6,000 barrels a day of oil to feed the energy-starved Vietnam economy."
What this guy doesn't tell you in his article is that the White Tiger oil field of Vietnam is an upthrusted block of fractured basalt, into which oil from a younger, but now lower-lying sedimentary block has seeped and pooled.
Here is an excerpt from a paper on White Tiger:
aapg.confex.com
"A complex of geological, geochemical and analytical investigations of oils and rocks of White Tiger (carbon isotopic composition, gas chromatography, chromatography-mass spectrometry, biomarkers studies, “Rock-Eval”), allowed to make a conclusion, that oil of unique White Tiger field has biogenic genesis - main source rocks are oil-producing Oligocene rocks, characterized with high organic matter content."
"Dr. J. F. Kenney is one of the only Western geophysicists who has taught and worked in Russia, studying under Vladilen Krayushkin, who developed the huge Dnieper-Donets Basin. Kenney told me in a recent interview that “alone to have produced the amount of oil to date that (Saudi Arabia’s) Ghawar field has produced would have required a cube of fossilized dinosaur detritus, assuming 100% conversion efficiency, measuring 19 miles deep, wide and high.” In short, an absurdity."
Well of course it would be absurd. Once again, oil is not formed from squashed dinosaurs. Oil is largely formed from the rich organic ooze that is metres thick on every ocean floor and is continually being buried by fresh sediment. It consists mostly of plankton and many other microscopic species that are in extreme abundance in the world's oceans. As they die, their little bodies sink to the ocean floor.
Collectively, this easily provides the volume of organic matter described above.
IT HAS BUGGER ALL TO DO WITH SQUASHED DINOSAURS!
Thanks for a great laugh.
I enjoyed making this post.
Cheers all,
S&P |
