<Lord Browne Speaks, Beyond Petroleum?The Oil DrumLest you know not yourselves>

47 comments on Here It Comes: 'Fossil fuel' theory takes hit with NASA finding

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Luis de Sousa on December 2, 2005 - 3:23am Permalink | Subthread | Comments top
First: As pointed out before, Methane is not Oil.
Second: I'm not a geologist, so I can't argue if Oil is of a biotic nature or not. And I don't even care about that. All I know is that it has been depleted much faster than it has been replenished (beeing that the case).
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Madman on December 2, 2005 - 7:05am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
All I know is that it has been depleted much faster than it has been replenished

Lads, you are right on the money!  Chemistry gave me a headache so I cannot tell you how this forms that and becomes what.  I can talk fluid dynamics and flow rates.  

I have never seen a guesstimate from the Abiotic crowd on how much oil the earth is supposed to be producing.  It can't be much.  If it was, there would be oil laying all about the surface.  The geologic 'traps' would fill and oil would be dripping to the surface.

However, lets stipulate the earth is producing a million barrels of oil a day.  Thats a lot!  Half a supertaker.  Not enough?  128 acre-feet of oil.  Lets say 10 million. More than 2 cubic MILES of oil every day.

We are pumping some 80+ million bbls a day out of the ground....  We are in trouble.  BTW, if the oil is supposed to be coming from the 'center of the earth', why is it concentrated in certain, specific places?  

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Quantoken on December 2, 2005 - 3:00pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
The calculation is incorrect. The world uses about 30 billion barrels a year. That is slightly more than 1 cubic mile per year. Not 16 cubic mile per day.

Assuming the total remaining recoverable oil in the world is 600 billion barrels, if you lay that oil evenly on the surface of the earth, it's a thin layer of slightly less than 0.5 milimeter thick. That tells you how precious petroleum is. If it were abiotic, vastly much more quantity of oil would have been found already.

If you divide that quantity by the total volume of the earth, it's only 8.8x10^-5 ppm of the earth's volume. That's how precious oil is and we should be grateful that the petroleum, which is of biological origin, is concentrated in a way for us to retrieve easily.

It's true abiotic methane is found in plenty else where in the solar system. Since earth is formed from the same primordal soup, one may reasonably suspect that the same abiotic methane may exist on earth. The very origin of life on earth requires a high concentration of organic material in the promordal soup that formed the earth.

But it's all irrevevant as pie in the sky, or as irrelevant as methane on the Titan, as long as we have not found where these methane are on the earth, or have no reasonable way of retrieving and utilizing these methanes. We already know there is plenty of methane hydrates, equivalent to several times the known petroleum reserves, right underneath the bottom of oceans. But we currently have no technology to fetch those methanes hydrates.

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Madman on December 2, 2005 - 9:54pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
Your right.  I did the math quickly on the way out the door this morning with the wife fussing that we were late.

1 bbl oil = 5.6145833 cuft (per www.onlineconversion.com)

5.6145833*10^6 cuft / 5280 ft / 5280 ft / 5280 ft = 0.00003814 mi^3.

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Twilight on December 2, 2005 - 8:25am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
I'm an electrical engineer - I don't have a dog in the fight about how it formed.  It's interesting, but not very important.  As you say, what is important is that it is depeleting, and whatever the formation process is it is geological in time scale.  

But these thought diversions will continue to be spoon-fed to a willing popluation that does not want to hear bad news, by those who do not want them to hear it.  It's all good!  Please continue shopping.

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SmartAlex on December 5, 2005 - 6:56pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
"I know is that it has been depleted much faster than it has been replenished (beeing that the case)."

This is at the heart of the abiotic oil debate!  How do we know that our reserves are actually depleting?  The oil companies tell us!  If the oil reserves were not depleting, they couldn't charge so much.  Supply and demand.  Limit supply, prices go up.  So I ask again, how do we REALLY know that the oil reserves are drying up?

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