Dystopian Futures -- Is Our Hysteria Based On Facts?

On Saturday I posted an article I'd published in the late 90's about the work of Thomas Gold, an astrophysicist who turned his attention to the study of oil and its origins. The latter part of his life was devoted to confirming his theory that oil was an inexhaustible resource, not a scarce byproduct of decayed vegetation and dinosaurs.

For whatever reason, his research doesn't seem to be gaining any traction in the public mind. Instead, the same tired old hysteria keeps being repeated, that oil is being depleted and civilization as we know it is in serious trouble.

Here are more examples of the fear mongering.

1. "War, poverty and disease will probably not be eradicated... Yet they afflict only a portion of us at any time. However, economic and environmental disaster will likely afflict us all. That is why I foresee a set of concerns centered on energy us--resource depletion, disease and environmental decay--as the foremost problem confronting global citizens in the coming decades."
--Joseph M. Shuster, Beyond Fossil Fools

2. "This book is about oil--its birth, life and approaching death."
--Dilip Hiro, Blood of the Earth: The Battle for the World's Vanishing Oil Resources

3. The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of Oil, Climate Change, and Other Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century by J. H. Kunstler

According to the Amazon description: "A controversial hit that sparked debate among businessmen, environmentalists, and bloggers, The Long Emergency by James Howard Kunstler is an eye-opening look at the unprecedented challenges we face in the years ahead, as oil runs out and the global systems built on it are forced to change radically."

4. Out of Gas: The End of the Age of Oil by David Goodstein
From the subtext: "Science tells us that an oil crisis is inevitable. Why and when? And what will our future look like without our favorite fuel?"

5. Crossing the Rubicon: The Decline of the American Empire at the End of the Age of Oil by Michael C. Ruppert

6. Confronting Collapse: The Crisis of Energy and Money in a Post Peak Oil World is another by Mr. Ruppert.

7. Life After Peak Oil by the South Korean research firm Life and Light.
"Peak Oil" is the tag line for the high water mark for oil production, with a downward slide ever after.
"Life After Peak Oil is an effort by South Korean research firm Light and Life to hold a friendly, yet frank, discussion with the world’s citizens about several important issues we face. The primary focus is around the limitations of fossil fuels, with peak-oil either already here or rapidly approaching, and the need to adapt our cultures to fit the natural reality."

8. Beyond Oil: The View from Hubbert's Peak by Kenneth F. Deffeyes
Beyond Oil is even endorsed by a Nobel Laureate who states, "This book explains both why the decline of our most precious fuel is inevitable and how challenging it will be to cope with what comes next."―Richard E. Smalley, University Professor, Rice University, and 1996 Nobel laureate

Not every voice on this topic is singing in unison. Here are a few of the contrarians.

1. The "Peak Oil" Scare and the Coming Oil Flood by Michael C. Lynch

Is the earth's oil supply starting to run out, or is there far more oil than some experts believe? This book points out flaws in the research used to warn of an oil shortfall and predicts that large new reserves of oil are soon to be tapped.

2. The Deep Hot Biosphere: The Myth of Fossil Fuels by Thomas Gold

Again, it was reading about Gold's work in the 80's that left me out of step with the prevailing winds. One reviewer of this book at Amazon.com stated: "My family has been in the oil business almost since it began. Being a very curious person, I received satisfactory explanations on every aspect of the business with one exception; how oil was created. I have never believed that crude oil came from dinosaurs and plants. Everyone else seems to believe it but I didn't and so I looked for a more satisfactory explanation. That is how I came upon Mr. Gold's book. His theory on the origin of oil is so compelling and answers so many questions, I have few doubts he will be proven correct in the future. In looking at this problem from so many different disciplines, he can see things that most people just cannot see."

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Please note that I am limiting this discussion to the singular theme of oil. I am not in any way denying that we have a host of problems waiting to ambush us in the years ahead. I do not believe that running out of oil is one of them.

What do you think?

Photo Credit: Chad Teer, courtesy Wikipedia Commons

Are Fossil Fuels An Old-Fashioned Idea Whose Time Has Gone?

All my life I've heard people declaring that we were running out of oil. Many of these prognosticators were proclaiming that in ten years this disastrous event would occur. As recent as 2004 someone on our local radio was making this claim. The notion has been so ingrained in our heads that for the general public it has become a common assumption. To this day you can find articles fretting that because oil is in finite supply sooner or later it will come to an end, and with it civilization as we know it.

As early as the 1980s I began questioning the popular notions about where oil comes from, and maybe earlier. It just never made sense to me that oil came from decayed vegetative matter and dinosaurs. There's just too much of it. So when I read about Dr. Thomas Gold's theories as conveyed in an article in The Atlantic, I was ripe for the taking. In September 1999 I presented my thoughts on this topic in this article that appeared in National Oil & Lube News.

ARE FOSSIL FUELS AN OLD-FASHIONED IDEA WHOSE TIME HAS GONE?

IN 1964 MY FAMILY MOVED from Cleveland to New Jersey. I was twelve years old and we never had so much company in our lives. All our relatives from the Midwest came east to see us that year. I supposed it was the new house they wanted to see, but later I understood that it was really, among other things, the1964-1965 New York World's Fair that attracted all these kin. If you add in all the class trips and scouting outings, I must have gone two dozen times, which is just about what it takes to really grasp the magnitude and scope of all that it contained.

The World's Fair produced many memorable images, including the Unisphere, itself the featured symbol of the Fair. Another memorable image was a large green brontosaur at the Sinclair Pavilion. There's no way to adequately describe the effect those Mustangs had on us at the Ford Pavilion. In retrospect it seems only natural that the world's largest industry, the auto industry, should be so prominently featured.

There's no question Sinclair's dinosaur was a powerful symbol. Dinosaurs had great power in the imaginations of young people. Whatever became of the dinosaurs? That big green brontosaurus graphically planted the answer in our minds. Yesterday's dinosaurs are today's fuel. It is all part of the circle of life, you might say. Yesterday's dead critters and ancient vegetation are producing today's energy, hence our familiarity with the term "Fossil Fuels" when speaking of gas and petroleum.

The only problem with the dino image is this: What if it's not true?

A 1986 cover story in The Atlantic Monthly, "The Origin of Petroleum" by David Osbourne, shot some rather large holes in the fossil fuels theory. Osbourne is a journalist who brought to a wider audience the ideas of a certain maverick astrophysicist named Thomas Gold.

The occasion for Osbourne's article was a gigantic drilling operation which was about to commence in the Siljan Ring, a site in northern Sweden where a giant meteorite crashed into the earth 360 million years ago. The drilling would take more than a year in an attempt to penetrate deeper than three miles beneath the surface.

What Gold was attempting to prove was that petroleum is not a scarce resource in danger of being soon depleted. This is because oil and gas are not, according to Gold, byproducts of ancient animal life. Gold was attempting to prove his theory that oil and gas come from the earth itself.

Six arguments for drawing this conclusion are as follows:

1. The geographical distribution of oil seems derived from features much larger in scale than individual sedimentary features.

2. The quantities of oil and gas available are hundreds of times those estimated on the basis of biological origins.

3. The so-called "molecular fossils" found in oil and claimed as proof of a biogenic origin are simply biological contaminants, particularly bacteria that feed upon the petroleum.

4. Petroleum is largely saturated with hydrogen, whereas buried biological matter should exhibit a deficiency of hydrogen.

5. Oil and gas are often rich in helium, an inert gas which biological processes cannot concentrate.

6. The great oil reservoirs of the Middle East are in diverse geological provinces. There is no unifying feature for the region as a whole and, especially, no sediments rich in biological debris that could have produced these immense concentrations of oil and gas.

At the time I found the notions fascinating but not much more. Last month, while reading an article titled "Why We'll Never Run Out of Oil" (Discover, June 1999) I began wondering whatever became of the Siljan Ring drilling program. Especially since the Discover article, contrary to my expectations based on the title, made no mention of these radical ideas whatsoever. In fact, the article went into great detail explaining the organic origins of oil.

I suddenly became keenly interested in the results of that study in Sweden. What did they find? Was it a bust? Utilizing the power of the internet I did some of my own digging and came up with what I was looking for. A simple search on Thomas Gold yielded plenty.

I learned that the one year Siljan Ring drilling program actually took six years. The results have been interpreted and Gold has published plenty to support his views, including a new book called "The Deep Hot Biosphere". Gold's theories may be Copernican in importance. (It was Copernicus, you may recall, who postulated the radical notion that the earth goes round the sun and not vice versa. We tend to forget that more than a century passed before this became "common knowledge.")

I also found an excellent article explaining why it is not possible for two separate notions of the origins of oil to co-exist. Gold's article, "Can There Be Two Independent Sources of Commercial Hydrocarbon Deposits, One Derived from Biological Materials, the Other from Primordial Carbon and Hydrogen, Incorporated into the Earth at its Formation?" is explicit and emphatic. There can only be one origin of oil, Gold asserts.

If Gold is right, then the early scientists who called it "rock oil" were much closer to the truth than the ad men who invented the Sinclair mascot. But popular ideas die hard, and so it is that while much has been written, to date the average person seems aware of only the prevailing, somewhat discredited, view.

The point of all this confabulation? Two observations come immediately to mind. First, there appears to be no reason today to be concerned about oil supply. The alarm over an oil shortage in the seventies was an event, not a trend. Oil is an abundant resource and the future of our industry is not going to be jeopardized by oil shortages other than those caused by political maneuverings.*

Second, ideas that initially seem off the wall may have more merit than first thought. When you open your minds, you'll discover that extended drain intervals and synthetic lubricants offer more profit potential than you originally imagined.

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*EdNote: Oil shortages can also be the result of market forces, which I did not consider at the time this was originally written.

Are We Really Running Out Of Oil?

I remember back in the Seventies when The Population Bomb was popular and the prophets of doom seemed to have taken over all the media soapboxes so that we were running out of food and running out of oil and running out of everything because there were too many people. Paul McCartney himself wrote about it on his Ram album: "Too Many People." At that time things were compounded by economic collapse and Cold War mania.

In the Eighties, even though things seemed to boom there was this constant reminder that we were going to run out of oil. I always remember statements like, "We will run out of oil in the next ten years." In the Nineties, ten years later, I would occasionally hear this same lament on talk radio, and in 2003 our local talk show Leftie Duke Skorich was rambling on with the same tired warning: "And we will be out of oil in ten years. As you know we are completely dependent on oil today."

The whole oil lament reminds me of the Flatworlders who had a difficult time getting their heads around the Copernican notion that the earth was round. Copernicus, who so feared telling the truth about his observations that he waited till he was on his deathbed lest the Church burn him as a heretic, understood how the Cosmos worked when it came to the movement of heavenly bodies.

And in our own time, it was an astrophysicist who accidentally discovered the possibility that oil had nothing to do with dead vegetation and dinosaurs, but was part part of the core content of our earth.

His name was Thomas Gold, of Cornell University. He studied asteroids. And one day he began asking the right question about what he was observing. Why are there hydrocarbon chains on asteroids coming in from outer space if hydrocarbon molecules are from dead plants and animals? Good question, Mr. Gold.

In 1999 I wrote an article about Professor Gold's work, which I myself had encountered in 1986 in a cover story that appeared in The Atlantic magazine. My piece, which appeared in the National Oil & Lube News, was called "Are Fossil Fuels An Old Fashioned Idea Whose Time Has Gone?"

It begins by my recounting a trip to the 1964 New York World's Fair and the large dinosaur that was an emblem for Sinclair, for fossil fuels and the oil industry. I wrote:

There's no question Sinclair's dinosaur was a powerful symbol. Dinosaurs had great power in the imaginations of young people. Whatever became of the dinosaurs? That big green brontosaurus graphically planted the answer in our minds. Yesterday's dinosaurs are today's fuel. It is all part of the circle of life, you might say. Yesterday's dead critters and ancient vegetation are producing today's energy, hence our familiarity with the term "Fossil Fuels" when speaking of gas and petroleum.

The only problem with the dino image is this: What if it's not true?

Well, here we are ten years later and people still don't realize how abundant our world's oil supply is. For better or for worse, here is a very recent account from Discovery News. Check it out: Earth's Mantle: Untapped Oil Source?

The July 27, 2009 piece by Michael Reilly begins, "Oil, one of the most important, valuable substances on the planet may form in an unexpected place, according to a new study -- the crushing hot furnace of Earth's mantle."

Sound familiar? Here's a little more.

The petroleum we rely on to fuel our cars and heat our homes were formed over millions of years as ancient, dead algae and plankton were compressed in layers of sediment and heated. Because of this, oil companies know to look for new reserves in places that are, or once were shallow marine environments.

For decades, though, scientists have toyed with a tantalizing alternative theory of petroleum formation: What if chemical reactions between water and minerals deep in Earth's mantle could send black gold bubbling up into the crust?

Alexander Goncharov of the Carnegie Institution of Washington in Washington, D.C and a team of researchers have shown that just such a thing is possible. They heated methane (CH4) up to 1,500 degrees Kelvin (2,240 degrees Fahrenheit) and mimicked the squeezing effect of being buried under over 100 kilometers (62 miles) of solid rock.

The results were astonishing -- methane readily transformed into butane (C4H10) and propane (C3H8), two common components of crude oil.

Now, what it some of our other common unquestioned convictions are inaccurate. Global warming seems plausible but is it man-produced?

What are the implications of this discovery, that oil is abundant and will never be exhausted?

Just sowing a few seeds here. In the meantime, breathe deep and make the most of your day.