From ScienceDaily, potentially good news for human beings, and thus potentially bad news for "environmentalists" and other fans of powerful, coercive government:
Researchers at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Stockholm have managed to prove that fossils from animals and plants are not necessary for crude oil and natural gas to be generated. The findings are revolutionary since this means, on the one hand, that it will be much easier to find these sources of energy and, on the other hand, that they can be found all over the globe.
Gee, no kidding. But don't worry: I would expect this seemingly-crucial discovery, and any independent confirmation, to have no impact whatsoever.
It continually stuns me how dense and primitive we can be — and yet how deeply impressed with ourselves we also are. Astronomers find hydrocarbons on Hyperion (a moon of Saturn), entire lakes of ethane and methane on Titan, and yet those same substances, and their products must be only or primarily products of biological processes on earth? We pump billions of barrels of oil out of a field and it refills — from below — and we don't notice that probably means there's something wrong with our capacity estimates? Oil is found nowhere near sedimentary rock — and almost nobody finds this even remotely interesting?
Of course not. Because "science" is carried out and propagated by people, and people tend to have agendas.
Here's a nice overview of the abiotic oil theory of Thomas Gold. Favorite quote:
The coal we dig is hard, brittle stuff [but] it was once a liquid, because we find embedded in the middle of a six-foot seam of coal such things as a delicate wing of some animal or a leaf of a plant. They are undestroyed, absolutely preserved, with every cell in that fossil filled with exactly the same coal as all the coal on the outside... The fact that coal contains fossils does not prove that it is a fossil fuel; it proves exactly the opposite. Those fossils you find in coal prove that coal is not made from those fossils. How could you take a forest and mulch it all up so that it is a completely featureless big black substance and then find one leaf in it that is perfectly preserved? That is absolute nonsense.
This post of yours had me laughing out loud. I don't know your background, but it clearly is not in this field. What's more disturbing is the credulity and lack of critical thinking in evidence that is independent of any specialized knowledge.
I think that I can assume by your choice of using it that you found the Science Daily quote to be persuasive. I, on the other hand, was immediately struck by the non sequiturs. "The findings are revolutionary since this means, on the one hand, that it will be much easier to find these sources of energy and, on the other hand, that they can be found all over the globe." Even if it were proven that ALL oil and gas are abiotic, that fact would mean neither of the above "revolutionary findings".
Your response of "Gee, no kidding" prompted me to read on and then your ridiculous implied argument regarding extra-terrestrial hydrocarbons and equally ridiculous implied straw man version of geologist's reasoning led me to read your cited material as well.
The quality of some of these cites is rather atrocious, yet you cited them, so you must have felt them to credible, which is indicative of difficulties with assessing evidence. In many places, your cited sources, when taken in toto, do not support even the conclusions made within them.
The Geological Society of London paper doesn't support, claim to support, or even imply support for your conclusions, though I can see how someone unschooled and with a preconceived conclusion in mind my interpret it as you surely did.
The Newsday article is a confused mass of pop-science written for, and apparently by, lay persons with a very shallow understanding. Even after reading it all, I couldn't say for sure what it's thesis truly is. I'm guessing that it simply observes that oil and gas can leak to the surface and that some reservoirs have partially refilled, neither of which is news or even surprising in spite of remarks to the contrary. From this, it makes the grand leap that it is evidence for John Hunt being correct! Talk about non sequitur.
It went on and on about hydrocarbon consuming biota at seeps because it thinks that evidence of "long term" seepage is important to the argument, when it actually means nothing in that regard. It made or implied several misstatements of fact, including implying that oil and gas explorers ignored seeps and had previously not thought that natural gas was continually produced. It implied that production of gas is required to force oil upward, ignoring the fact that oil is generally lighter than water and rocks are much denser; the Gulf blowout well head pressure was 5800psi above the crushing pressure of a mile of water because two miles of rock were pressing down on it.
It also states that the oil refilling a reservoir has been dated to the Jurassic and Cretaceous eras and that refilling doesn't occur in most reservoirs, which doesn't do your Tommy Gold piece any favors.
Which leads us to the almost entirely self-referenced Gold piece from that wack survivalist/conspiracy theorist/catch-all Suburban Emergency Management Project. Apparently this is your source for the supposed significance of extraterrestrial hydrocarbons.
The proper way to respond is "So what?" The facts are that the Earth is very geologically active. Almost all of its original crust has been recycled at least once. Most of the sedimentary rocks that have ever existed have been recycled as well. The mantle sustains continuous convection currents, which not only play a role in plate tectonics, but also insures that light compounds like hydrocarbons were long ago purged from the deep Earth.
Although it's almost certain that some small amount of hydrocarbons from the original accretion of the Earth and the Late Heavy Bombardment have managed to escape being cycled through some sort of biology, it is impossible that it is anything near the majority of it. Also, as verified by one of your sources and in direct opposition to an ignorant claim of another of your sources, oil and coal usually carry evidence of their biological origins. The retarded observation about fossil impressions in coal shows a complete ignorance of the processes involved.
Bottom line - Lower level deposits of oil and gas can migrate to refill higher reservoirs. Everyone in the field knows that. In fact, predicting how and where it does exactly that is the primary tactic of exploration! Oil decays and evolves gas. Also old news. None of that implies that there is either a lot more oil and gas or that it is primarily abiotic. Nor is there any great evidence for a lot of abiotic oil and gas or it being more evenly distributed than is the unfortunate case.
Actually, the real bottom line is this - You are not only ignorant of the science, you are very credulous about claims that you want to believe. The question is why you want to believe.
I'm not the first to observe that religious fundamentalists seem to arrive at similar conclusions on what should be scientific matters. Is it just coincidence that they tend to deny global warming, even insisting that it is all a massive conspiracy theory? Is it just coincidence that they tend to believe that there is plenty of oil and that all talk to the contrary is misinformation? Of course not.
The unfortunate bottom line is that they derive their conclusions indirectly from ideological sources. Something like this -
God gave man dominion over the Earth, told us to multiply, and said after the Deluge that he'd never get that destructive again, so that means we're immune from any environmental crises or resource limitations. Therefore, AGW cannot be true, nor can Peak Oil.
Then, in a most unscientific manner, they proceed from conclusion to deciding what evidence they accept and reject. If everyone were truly scientific in their approach, there would be no correlation along religious lines.
A fundy, of course, would claim that it is the non-religious and the duped who are allowing bias into science, but consider what the actual scientists have to say. They are, in both these cases and others, such as evolution, at the opposite end of the spectrum. Thus the fundy must cultivate a conspiracy theorist's mindset bordering on paranoid delusion.
That's the bottom line.
This post of yours had me laughing out loud. I don't know your background, but it clearly is not in this field. What's more disturbing is the credulity and lack of critical thinking in evidence that is independent of any specialized knowledge.
I think that I can assume by your choice of using it that you found the Science Daily quote to be persuasive. I, on the other hand, was immediately struck by the non sequiturs. "The findings are revolutionary since this means, on the one hand, that it will be much easier to find these sources of energy and, on the other hand, that they can be found all over the globe." Even if it were proven that ALL oil and gas are abiotic, that fact would mean neither of the above "revolutionary findings".
Your response of "Gee, no kidding" prompted me to read on and then your ridiculous implied argument regarding extra-terrestrial hydrocarbons and equally ridiculous implied straw man version of geologist's reasoning led me to read your cited material as well.
The quality of some of these cites is rather atrocious, yet you cited them, so you must have felt them to credible, which is indicative of difficulties with assessing evidence. In many places, your cited sources, when taken in toto, do not support even the conclusions made within them.
The Geological Society of London paper doesn't support, claim to support, or even imply support for your conclusions, though I can see how someone unschooled and with a preconceived conclusion in mind my interpret it as you surely did.
The Newsday article is a confused mass of pop-science written for, and apparently by, lay persons with a very shallow understanding. Even after reading it all, I couldn't say for sure what it's thesis truly is. I'm guessing that it simply observes that oil and gas can leak to the surface and that some reservoirs have partially refilled, neither of which is news or even surprising in spite of remarks to the contrary. From this, it makes the grand leap that it is evidence for John Hunt being correct! Talk about non sequitur.
It went on and on about hydrocarbon consuming biota at seeps because it thinks that evidence of "long term" seepage is important to the argument, when it actually means nothing in that regard. It made or implied several misstatements of fact, including implying that oil and gas explorers ignored seeps and had previously not thought that natural gas was continually produced. It implied that production of gas is required to force oil upward, ignoring the fact that oil is generally lighter than water and rocks are much denser; the Gulf blowout well head pressure was 5800psi above the crushing pressure of a mile of water because two miles of rock were pressing down on it.
It also states that the oil refilling a reservoir has been dated to the Jurassic and Cretaceous eras and that refilling doesn't occur in most reservoirs, which doesn't do your Tommy Gold piece any favors.
Which leads us to the almost entirely self-referenced Gold piece from that wack survivalist/conspiracy theorist/catch-all Suburban Emergency Management Project. Apparently this is your source for the supposed significance of extraterrestrial hydrocarbons.
The proper way to respond is "So what?" The facts are that the Earth is very geologically active. Almost all of its original crust has been recycled at least once. Most of the sedimentary rocks that have ever existed have been recycled as well. The mantle sustains continuous convection currents, which not only play a role in plate tectonics, but also insures that light compounds like hydrocarbons were long ago purged from the deep Earth.
Although it's almost certain that some small amount of hydrocarbons from the original accretion of the Earth and the Late Heavy Bombardment have managed to escape being cycled through some sort of biology, it is impossible that it is anything near the majority of it. Also, as verified by one of your sources and in direct opposition to an ignorant claim of another of your sources, oil and coal usually carry evidence of their biological origins. The retarded observation about fossil impressions in coal shows a complete ignorance of the processes involved.
Bottom line - Lower level deposits of oil and gas can migrate to refill higher reservoirs. Everyone in the field knows that. In fact, predicting how and where it does exactly that is the primary tactic of exploration! Oil decays and evolves gas. Also old news. None of that implies that there is either a lot more oil and gas or that it is primarily abiotic. Nor is there any great evidence for a lot of abiotic oil and gas or it being more evenly distributed than is the unfortunate case.
Actually, the real bottom line is this - You are not only ignorant of the science, you are very credulous about claims that you want to believe. The question is why you want to believe.
I'm not the first to observe that religious fundamentalists seem to arrive at similar conclusions on what should be scientific matters. Is it just coincidence that they tend to deny global warming, even insisting that it is all a massive conspiracy theory? Is it just coincidence that they tend to believe that there is plenty of oil and that all talk to the contrary is misinformation? Of course not.
The unfortunate bottom line is that they derive their conclusions indirectly from ideological sources. Something like this -
God gave man dominion over the Earth, told us to multiply, and said after the Deluge that he'd never get that destructive again, so that means we're immune from any environmental crises or resource limitations. Therefore, AGW cannot be true, nor can Peak Oil.
Then, in a most unscientific manner, they proceed from conclusion to deciding what evidence they accept and reject. If everyone were truly scientific in their approach, there would be no correlation along religious lines.
A fundy, of course, would claim that it is the non-religious and the duped who are allowing bias into science, but consider what the actual scientists have to say. They are, in both these cases and others, such as evolution, at the opposite end of the spectrum. Thus the fundy must cultivate a conspiracy theorist's mindset bordering on paranoid delusion.
That's the bottom line.
Posted by: Kyle on December 7, 2010 07:46 PM