Do We Really Need Green Energy?

Now that “global warming” or “climate change” as the Democrats now call it has proven to be a hoax, it is time to address their new plan of attack to control the economy. Their emphasis will shift to a green economy to conserve our limited and finite reserves of oil. The validity of finite oil reserves becomes the question. Is oil really a depletable resource? I’ll attempt to answer this with some of the latest theories on oil production.

The United States has oil and plenty of it, if only the Democrats would permit the oil companies to drill. I assume (with doubt) that oil might someday, far off in the future, be depleted, but each time someone predicts the end of our oil coffers, somehow new reserves are found. To stop the zealots that want to save the earth and replace people with flora and fauna; the followers of the pseudo scientific religious belief in global warming and the alarmists that think we are running out of oil from just calling me a conservative who doesn’t care, I offer the following few paragraphs for their consideration concerning the depletion of oil.

There have been many predictions of the world running out of oil. These prognostications have been taken to heart by the Democrats and accepted as dogma. Dr. J.F. Kenney a geologist and CEO of Gas Resources Corporation located in Houston, Texas as well as Russian scientists do not accept this belief. Dr. Kenney had taught and studied in Russia for five years alongside the developers of the Abiotic oil theory first enunciated in 1951 (CONSIDERATIONS ABOUT RECENT PREDICTIONS OF IMPENDING SHORTAGES OF PETROLEUM EVALUATED FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF MODERN PETROLEUM SCIENCE, http://www.gasresources.net).

In essence what the theory says is that “fossil fuels” do not arise from decayed biological detritus but are produced inorganically in the mantle crust interface in the earth somewhere between five and twenty miles deep. The hypothesis that the “fossil fuel” oil was created from decayed biological material was first put forth in 1757. The first rejection of this hypothesis occurred about a half century later. The German geologist A. von Humboldt and the French chemist L. J. Gay-Lussac (both quite famous scientists at the time) proposed that oil came from great depths within the earth and was unrelated to biological material. Another famous French chemist, M. Berthelot, scorned the biological origin notion and demonstrated that organic molecules could be created from inorganic materials. Other scientists of the time confirmed this result. During the latter part of the nineteenth century, the Russian scientist D. Mendeleev, discoverer of the Periodic Table of the Elements, proclaimed that oil is a primordial material that erupted from great depths beneath the earth. He hypothesized that the oil travelled along the pathway of deep faults. He was criticized by the geologists of the time because deep faults were unknown then. Today we know they exist as plate tectonics and are well understood. This was the basis for the development of the Abiotic Theory.

In 1946, Russia was an oil poor nation. The Russian government realized that this was an untenable situation as oil would be needed for economic expansion as well as for carrying out war in the event that such a possibility would occur. They initiated a program to find oil that was the equivalent of the Manhattan Project that the United States created to develop the atomic bomb. This gave rise to the oil Abiotic Theory and to its development. Using these techniques, the Russians have managed to find oil in places which historical fossil fuel theories eliminated from consideration. By the mid 1980’s, Russia evolved from on oil poor country to an oil rich nation. Their success rate for oil drilling is considerably higher than that found in the United States. In the Russian Dnieper-Donets basin, a previously oil barren area according to fossil fuel theorists, sixty one wells were drilled and of those, thirty seven were commercially productive (F. W. Engdahl, Confessions of an “ex” Peak Oil Believer, Sept. 14, 2007, http://www.engdahl.oilgeopolitics.net/ ) compared to about a ten percent success rate in the USA (nine out of ten holes drilled are dry holes).

After Dr. Kenney became involved with the Russian developers in the late 1990’s and had worked along with Russian scientists to open up major oil fields in the country, he returned to the USA and started to introduce this technology into the United States. According to Dr. Kenney there are some 4000 scientific Russian papers on the subject but very few have been translated into the English language. Among Russian scientists, the fossil fuel theory is considered to be obsolete.

Dr. Kenney along with some Russian scientists, proved their point by synthesizing oil from ordinary inorganic (not the organic detritus generated by living things) materials in the laboratory and presented their results in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, USA (The evolution of multicomponent systems at high pressures: VI. The thermodynamic stability of the hydrogen–carbon system: The genesis of hydrocarbons and the origin of petroleum, http//www.pnas.org/content/99/17.toc Aug. 12, 2002). Dr. Kenney, just as the Russians do, believes that all oil is made this way and is for the taking. In the USA there are numerous dissenters to Dr. Kenney’s assertion. For example, the New Scientist reports (J. Hecht, You can squeeze oil out of a stone, Aug. 17, 2002, http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg17523562.000):
“Petroleum geologists already accept that some oil forms like this. Nobody ever argued that there are no inorganic sources, says Mike Lewan of the US Geological Survey. But they take strong issue with Kenney's claim that petroleum can't form from organic matter in shallow rocks.”
Notice that the argument here is not if oil can form from inorganic material but that some oil can’t form from organic material.

Dr. Thomas Gold (founding director of Cornell University Center for Radiophysics and Space Research) in his 1999 book, “The Deep Hot Biosphere” offers compelling evidence for the concept of how oil is formed as reported by WorldNet Daily (C. Bennett, Sustainable Oil?, May 25, 2004, www.wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=38645). According to WorldNet Daily:
“He notes that geologic structures where oil is found all correspond to "deep earth" formations, not the haphazard depositions we find with sedimentary rock, associated fossils or even current surface life. He also notes that oil extracted from varying depths from the same oil field have the same chemistry – oil chemistry does not vary as fossils vary with increasing depth. Also interesting is the fact that oil is found in huge quantities among geographic formations where assays of prehistoric life are not sufficient to produce the existing reservoirs of oil. Where then did it come from?”

I will give one more example taken from Bennett’s article that suggests that the Abiotic Theory points in the right direction for finding oil.
“About 80 miles off of the coast of Louisiana lies a mostly submerged mountain, the top of which is known as Eugene Island. The portion underwater is an eerie-looking, sloping tower jutting up from the depths of the Gulf of Mexico, with deep fissures and perpendicular faults which spontaneously spew natural gas. A significant reservoir of crude oil was discovered nearby in the late '60s, and by 1970, a platform named Eugene 330 was busily producing about 15,000 barrels a day of high-quality crude oil. By the late '80s, the platform's production had slipped to less than 4,000 barrels per day, and was considered pumped out. Done. Suddenly, in 1990, production soared back to 15,000 barrels a day, and the reserves which had been estimated at 60 million barrels in the '70s, were recalculated at 400 million barrels. Interestingly, the measured geological age of the new oil was quantifiably different than the oil pumped in the '70s. Analysis of seismic recordings revealed the presence of a "deep fault" at the base of the Eugene Island reservoir which was gushing up a river of oil from some deeper and previously unknown source.”

Raymond J. Learsy (Oil’s Big Dirty Secret as Producers Rake in Hundreds of Billions, Aug, 12, 2008 http://www.huffingtonpost.com/raymond-j-learsy/oils-dirty-big-secret-as_b_118380.html) wrote an interesting article in the Huffington Post concerning the theory and why it has not been wholeheartedly embraced in the United States. The following is a partial quote from his article:
“Is the theory of abiotic oil viable? I am not a geologist so I cannot begin to answer authoritatively. It is certainly worth exploring with far greater seriousness than has been the case to date. But I have come to learn the oil industry and its minions. One can rest assured that if abiotic oil is a true challenge to current theory and most especially in the dimension it is purported to be, the oil patch will do all in its power to divert our attention elsewhere. Were we to learn that the supply of oil is limitless, the emperor's clothes would evaporate and the price of oil would collapse.”

If the reader is truly interested in this subject, the references cited are worth reading.
Gene Pelc