Report on Geothermal Oil Generation: Is this for real?

[jmc]

I found this report where the author claims to have experimentally produced hydro-carbons at high temperatures using only FeO, Ca(CO3) and H2O at pressures of 50kbar and 1500 Celsius.

http://www.gasresources.net/Hi-p-VI(H-C-Genesis).pdf

[D Tibbets]

The link didn't work for me, but producing hydrocarbons is easy, so long as you have a source of carbon and hydrogen. Plants do it all the time with water and CO2 and Sunlight. The final ingredient is the key. You have to input energy. If you have to put in more energy than you get out from burning it, there is a net loss. If the product is scarce or more desirable and you have energy to spare, than it makes sense to make the substance through these endothermic reactions. This is one of the arguments for coal gassification. There is coal to spare, and converting it at a net energy loss might have some environmental benefits .

Now, if they are claiming they are producing net positive energy balances, they need to explain how they bypass current physics and chamistry understanding. Perhaps they could use solar heaters and claim this energy as free, but it would only be useful if the process was more economical that other methods of utilizing solar energy to get the end product (and the end product was valuable enough to justify the effort).

Dan Tibbets

[Betruger]

You have to paste the link manually.

[jmc]

They're not claiming this is some industrial process for producing hydrocarbons and creating net energy at the same time. Their saying that the original energy input of the oil we find today was of a geothermal nature, (water reacting with rocks far beneath the earth's surface where high temperature and pressure conditions exist) rather that being of solar origin (plants converting sunlight to chemical energy and then getting fossilized with the embodied energy from photosynthesis remaining in hydrocarbon form) which is the generally agreed origin of fossil fuels by most geologists.

[olivier]

There is a long article on Wikipedia about abiogenic petroleum origin.
Is it quack science or should it deserve some credit?

[chrismb]

Make sense to me. I think the question should not be if oil is so made but simply what the ratios of organic to inorganic oil are there. Both are viable mechanisms. Doesn't mean oil is all one type.

[doug l]

There's lots of energy to power the chemical process in the form of geothermal arising from deep within the earth. There is not really any dispute that petroleum and natural gas can be created this way. Rather the question is whether the petroleum that is trapped, concentrated and found in near surface sediments are from biology and then re-worked by geological processes, or if the geological carbon components which are part of the mantle and crust (as they seem to be for most of our planetary neighbors) are re-worked by near surface biological process. Not too long ago it was thought that no living organisms could exist down in crust, but we are learning that they not only exist but according to some, if all of it was scraped off and put into a single imaginary bucket the volume would excede the volume of all the life on the surface.
Conventional theory says that the organic signatures found in oil and gas are due to the fact that the actual organics come from the forarminifera and other living creatures whose skeletons we often find associated with these deposits. The abio-genesis folk will point out that gas and oil also contain plenty of substances that are not part of the biosphere (helium, heavy metals, other trace gases) and that the reason gas and oil are associated with the tiny casts of once living organisms is that sediments like that are the only place that would have available volumes in which gas and oil, in which these other substances have been entrained or are in solution, can collect in appreciable commercial amounts.
Jack Kenney of GasResources is one smart cookie. Thomas Gold was even smarter and needless to say they don't always agree with the other smart people who've thought about this. Cheers.

[davaguco]

I just want to point out that even if an abiotic source of oil was true, this would not affect the date of the end of oil era, as it is being replenished (from organic or inorganic matter) thousands of times slower than we extract it.

[chrismb]

fossil fuel reserves can NEVER run out. our ability to extract them all may become inadequate but there will always be around 5 times unburnt fuel to burnt. at the moment we have only burned about a 1/20,000th of it.

[davaguco]

The end of oil era won't be related to the end of oil, but with our inability to extract enough oil so that we are able to satisfy oil demand for all countries.

Extraction rates and energy returns of investments are the things that matter here, not how much oil is left underground.

So I basically agree with you.

But I believe I don't agree with you about the timeframe (when will these differences between available oil and demand will start).

It will probably happen on the next 5 years.

[kunkmiester]

Peak oil also has a political aspect--if we were allowed to drill with less superfluous regulation and Seirra Club lawsuits, peak oil would be another few dozen years down the line, and gas would be much cheaper than it is now.

[bcglorf]

Peak Oil also has a technophobe aspect to it. Every projection I've ever seen is all based on the assumption that oil usage will continue to grow for decades, unchanged by technology. It stinks to me of the same kind of mentality that would've surrounded cries of Peak Pasture available for horses.

Companies like Tesla Motors are proof positive that the day when batteries can effectively replace oil in automobiles is closer than any peak oil projections. More over, any approaching peak in oil production would accelerate the attractiveness of battery storage as quickly as it drives up oil prices.

[IntLibber]

I just want to point out that even if an abiotic source of oil was true, this would not affect the date of the end of oil era, as it is being replenished (from organic or inorganic matter) thousands of times slower than we extract it.

Not quite. We are extracting it from dome reservoirs that are filled from sources far deeper in the earth's crust.

Provided we capture CO2 from our industrial processes and drive it deep into these hydrothermal regions, there is no reason why we cannot speed up the generation process.

I once did an informal study of the amount of oil generated from subduction of methane hydrates globally, and it came out to several cubic km per year.

There is no peak of an oil era, there is merely a transition period that creates the market pressure to innovate means of extracting more oil from the same reserves. Current technology only extracts about 5-10% of the oil in an oil field.

One of the nice things about the tar sands reserves is that you can extract in excess of 90% of the oil in the sands (both in the Athabasca sands in Canada and the Anaconda sands in Venezuela). Both reserves contain more oil than Saudi Arabia has ever had. They are generally not counted in current estimates because until recently the cost of extracting oil from these reserves was greater than market prices. This is one of the dirty little secrets of those who disasturbate all the time about "the end of oil": estimates of reserves only count those extractable at present prices in a profitable manner, they don't count those that are more expensive to extract or may become affordable in the future when new technology is developed.

[KitemanSA]

Peak Oil also has a technophobe aspect to it.

"Peak oil" has a very "Club of Rome" feel to it. There is always some very rich person or group out there that doesn't mind screwing people via some "emergency situation" in order to become filthy rich. They have gone beyond the point where money is money to the point where money is power. And if diogenes wants to talk about harmful addictive stuff, "power" takes the cake over ANY mere chemical.

[MSimon]

Peak Oil also has a technophobe aspect to it.

"Peak oil" has a very "Club of Rome" feel to it. There is always some very rich person or group out there that doesn't mind screwing people via some "emergency situation" in order to become filthy rich. They have gone beyond the point where money is money to the point where money is power. And if diogenes wants to talk about harmful addictive stuff, "power" takes the cake over ANY mere chemical.

Hear, hear.