The
Source of
Oil
To begin with, we can distinguish between animal and vegetable oil, and
mineral oil. Every farmer knows what the sources of those first two
kinds of oil are; and mineral oil comes out of the ground, out of all
those rocks down there. Animal and vegetable oils can be eaten. They
are essential for life. Many vitamins, and so on. On the other hand, I
have certainly not tried the experiment of trying to eat mineral oil! I
can hardly imagine that that would be a pleasant experience. It's
probably poisonous!
Both kinds of oil can be burned, but
most people
would say that it would be a great waste to burn those oils which are
used in the kitchen. As far as lubrication is concerned, there is also
a great difference. For example, if you tried to oil the key work of a
flute, or of a lock, or a motor, then initially kitchen oils may
lubricate things satisfactorily, but after some days they will begin to
become rancid. They gum up, and soon the mechanism will will seize up
all together. Kitchen oils are no good for lubrication. For that you
need mineral oil.
But of course, ultimately mineral oil is
also an
animal or vegetable oil, isn't it? The energy in mineral oil is the
energy of sunlight, stored from the time way back there in geological
history when the earth was a great swamp, in the carboniferous period,
hundreds of millions of years ago. Thus the fact that we burn mineral
oil in great quantities, as if there were no tomorrow, is a great waste
of this unique, primitive, fossilized resource. It was created so long
ago, and once it is all burned up, then it is gone. Forever.
Such is the fate of the world's fossil
fuel
resources. Perhaps we have already reached the peak of oil production.
We are using it all up, so obviously it will become more and more
expensive in the future. We can see that this is happening already; the
price of mineral oil has quadrupled in just the last seven years (I am
writing this in the year 2007)! But this is a good thing. As the price
goes up, people will burn less of it, thus putting less carbon dioxide
into the earth's atmosphere, and so the effects of global warming will
be less than they would otherwise be.
Such is the conventional wisdom.
But I see no reason to believe in the
conventional
wisdom if it doesn't make sense!
So who am I to question the conventional wisdom? Well, I'm certainly
not a chemist, so I have no idea about the details concerning the
molecular differences between one kind of oil and the next. I did have
a smattering of geology as a first year student at the Australian
National University in Canberra. When I started studying at the
ANU in 1966, I really just
wanted to study physics. There were a number of other people who had
the same idea, and in the first year almost all of them took the
combination of courses: physics, pure mathematics, applied mathematics,
and chemistry. But for one reason or another, I substituted geology for
the chemistry course.
In those days, and presumably these days
as well,
geology was an important thing to study in Australia. After all, much
of the wealth of Australia derives from the export of minerals.
Therefore it is important to have well qualified people to travel
around the country, looking for good things to dig, or pump, out of the
earth. There must have been 60 or 70, or even more students in that
first year geology course at the ANU. At the end of the year, I think
large numbers of them failed. Luckily I did manage to scrape through,
and that was the end of my geology studies. There were too many exams
for my taste,
learning the names of countless different kinds of rocks, peering
through a microscope at thin slices of rock, using polarized light. And
so forth. It seemed to me that in an ideal world it would be the
simplest thing to just
have the earth being composed of a solid block of homogeneous concrete.
Then we could do away with all these different kinds of
complicated rocks which had to be learned for the exams!
For me, the most unpleasant part of
geology was the
excursions which the whole group took in order to look at the rocks in
the field. We all got into a big diesel bus and were transported from
one place to another. The diesel fumes and the motion of the bus made
me feel sick. Then the various things pointed out to us had to be
written down and memorized for the test at the end of the day. How
unpleasant! There was also the weekend excursion, which involved a trip
further afield, and camping out in tents. This should have been more
interesting. A couple of Russian geologists were visiting the geology
department of the ANU back then in 1966, and they came along on our
excursion. On the Saturday night, as darkness settled on the camp and
the campfire blazed, we students gathered around and spoke with the
professors. One question and another. One student wanted to know what
the professors thought about the theory of continental drift. After
all, this idea was hardly new. Alfred Wegener proposed the theory more
than 50 years before that time, in 1966. And our textbook, "Principles
of Physical Geology", by Arthur Holmes, devoted a few pages to the
theory. But our professors smiled knowingly. Don't waste your time on
such speculative rubbish they told us! And the Russian professors of
geology nodded their agreement in comfortable concurrence.
I said nothing, and I learned what I was
taught in
order to get through the exams. But it was totally clear to me that it
was their ideas concerning the basic
principle underlying geology which were truly rubbish. All
of
the details about the fossils, or the chemical compositions of the
rocks, such things were understood. But what is it that brings all
these things into being? All the spectacular foldings of rock
formations, the earthquakes along faults in the rocks, the rift
valleys. In the lectures they were not very clear about the forces
which were supposed to explain all of these things. Some talk about
volcanoes causing upliftings and associated submersions here and
there. Or maybe the primeval earth was hot, then in the process of
cooling, it contracted, resulting in the surface becoming shriveled, as
the skin of an apple shrivels when the apple dries out. Something like
that. One might call this the "Atlantis Theory" of geological movement.
This was the mainstream, accepted view in those days. If you wanted to
get a job in geology, or even become a professor of geology, this is
what you had to believe in. Alfred Wegener was a meteorologist, so he
was not in the professional geological "mainstream". I once looked at a
book which tackled the question of how it is that the fossils of
tropical organisms are found in the rocks of Antarctica. The answer,
according to this book, was that the entire crust of the earth moves
rigidly, floating on the hot liquid rocks below. Thus, when there is an
accumulation of mass near the poles, the centrifugal force of the
earth's rotation causes the crust to slide around - as a whole - to a
different position relative to the earth's rotation. And in fact, in a
long foreword, the great physicist Albert Einstein wrote in the book
that the theory seemed to him to be very sensible and plausible. So
there you are! Didn't Albert Einstein ever see these large, strongly
folded rock formations, showing anybody with eyes to see that the
earth's crust is not at all rigid?
Therefore, even if all the professional
geologists
of the world today say that all of the mineral oil of the world has a
biological origin, I'm still not convinced. I think that any sensible
person with a free mind to think about these things will agree that at
least some
of the mineral oil
is truly mineral. After all, we now know that the whole of Jupiter's
moon Titan is covered with methane and other "organic" compounds. Even
if life were to be discovered on Titan, it seems hard to believe that
all of this is of biological origin. Then we know that much of the
material in the dust clouds of inter-stellar space is composed of
"organic" material. How strange it would be if the present dogma of the
professional geologists of the world were true, and all the mineral oil
were to be exclusively
of
biological origin. So the question is really, what proportion of that
oil is of biological origin, and what proportion is "abiotic"?
(Geologists say that certain biological "markers" can be seen in
mineral oil. But then recently it has been found that certain bacteria
can live at great depths in the pores of the earths crust, perhaps
eating some of the abiotic oil, and thus they might be marking this oil
and confusing the geologists. The ratios of different isotopes are also
quoted. But again, this argument has been shown to be questionable.)
But how is it possible to form the organic
substance, oil, without living organisms?
Well, it is possible to make a viable
substitute for
mineral oil using the Fischer-Tropsch
process, which can convert any old oil, or even wood or coal, into
mineral oil. In order to do this, the substance being used is first
heated in the absence of oxygen in order to obtain pure carbon. Thus
the organic
raw product is
first heated to extract pure inorganic,
black carbon. Next the carbon is combined with sufficient oxygen to
produce carbon monoxide gas. Finally, this gas, together with hydrogen
gas, is passed through a
catalyzer to give an oil which is similar to mineral
oil. The firm of Sasol in South Africa uses this process. Apparently
they use coal as the raw material. Some utopian people experiment with
the Fischer-Tropsch process, the goal being to obtain mineral oil from
bio-mass, that is from the cuttings of plants, straw, and so on. There
are immense technical problems involved in such a project, owing
to the fact that everything gets gummed up when extracting the carbon,
which is the true starting point of the process, from all the organic
chemicals which are associated with that bio-mass.
But in reality, almost all the mineral
oil which we
use comes from deep within the earth, as if it really were a mineral,
not a
vegetable product. Long,
long ago, hundreds of millions of years ago (according to the
conventional wisdom), there was a
lot of organic activity at the surface of the earth, and all the dead
stuff gradually became buried deep within the earth. During all the
time between then and now, lots of it changed into coal (as we can see
by observing that
there are often fossils in coal deposits). Since coal is mostly carbon,
I suppose the lighter parts were squeezed out of it, escaping and
migrating
upwards, towards the surface of the earth. Some of this migrating light
stuff must have been trapped in the
geological formations under Saudi Arabia, the Gulf of Mexico, and all
those other places.
But wait a minute! Isn't most coal right
up at the
surface of the earth, or at least not that far down? Why is it that the
oil and
natural gas is found so far down? After all, those oil wells are
drilled thousands of feet down into bedrock!
Perhaps the reason is that there were
huge
amounts of primeval matter hundreds of millions of years ago, which
went way,
way down to the depths of the earth, and when it was
there, the
oil and gas was squeezed out. But on the other hand, if the coal near
the surface had its oil and gas squeezed out of it despite the fact
that there was hardly any pressure up near the top, why was this deep
primeval organic material
able to descend way, way down, with the pressure building up all the
time, and yet it still was able to keep its oil and gas intact, only
to finally be released at great depth? That doesn't seem to make much
sense!!
And what about all the gases
which are released by volcanoes?
In fact, if you take the trouble to look
it up, you
will see
that, besides water in the form of steam (that is to say, lots of
hydrogen and oxygen), the main gases released in volcanoes are carbon
dioxide and
sulfur dioxide. So we certainly do have the raw materials for the
Fischer-Tropsch process here, don't we? And it seems to me that all of
that percolating through various minerals at high temperatures and
pressures might be able to catalyze something!
I hadn't really thought about these
things before
reading about them in the internet. Surely this question is of the
greatest interest for the world these days! At the present time "we" -
that is to say, the "Coalition of the Willing" - are invading one
oil-producing country after another,
causing immense suffering, for no other reason - apparently - than that
of securing possession of the dwindling sources of the worlds mineral
oil. Since we are rapidly running out of oil, the price of filling up
the car increases dramatically. The price of a barrel of oil is at
record levels. We have reached the situation of "Peak Oil"!
That is to say, the production of oil is now at its peak, and since
the supplies are dwindling, there will be less and less in the future,
despite the fact that more and more people will want to have it.
But hang on a minute! As you see, I am
not the
youngest person in the world since I started my university studies in
1966. And, seemingly in contrast to many people my age, I can still
remember many of the things which were going on back in those days.
Back
then, we had the "Club of Rome", which was filled with very important
people. I think there were lots of
Nobel Prize winners in it. It was very serious. They were not only
thinking about oil; they were thinking about all kinds of resources
which humanity was going through at a frightening rate. The best minds
in the world got together, using the best algorithms for calculating
the numbers, and they showed beyond any possibility of doubt that the
resources of the earth were running out. A table was published, showing
the times in the future when the various resources would finally be
finished. I've forgotten the details. It was like: iron in 1985, zinc
in 1979, aluminum in 1982, and so on and so forth. Almost everything
would be completely gone within 10 or 15 years. A few things would
still be there to scratch out of the earth in 20 or 25 years, but
hardly anything of any importance was in that category. Certainly not
oil. And yet here we are, 35 years later, and the reality is that for
years there has been a crisis in the countries which mainly live from
exporting the basic resources of the earth. The crisis is not that they
have run out, and so have nothing to sell! No. Quite the contrary. They
have too much to sell, so the prices of all these raw materials have
sunk down to rock bottom!
But at least this is not the case with
oil. So maybe
the Club of Rome was a bit crazy with its predictions about all the
other resources of the world, but they did seem to tip it right - if in
a rather over-exaggerated way - when it came to oil. Didn't they? Or
were they just as crazy about oil as they were about all the other
things?
To answer this question in a rational
way, we should
think about why the price of oil is so high these days, in contrast to
the other raw materials which we use and which are extremely cheap. In
the year 2000, before the presidency of George W. Bush, the price of
oil was around about $20 per barrel or so, and
everybody - or almost everybody - seemed happy. Now it has climbed to
$80 per barrel! Iraq has been bombed to smithereens, but on the other
hand, in the year 2000 there was an embargo on oil from Iraq, so in the
balance of oil supply, there is hardly any change there. The
other oil producing countries have agreed to pump more, so the supply
has actually increased. The reasons given for the high price are that
hardly any new refineries have been built by the oil companies and the
old ones are breaking down, so that all this oil can't be used in the
quantities which are available. Furthermore, Iran, which is also a
major supplier, although it is supplying lots of oil onto the world
market now, might - for one reason or another - be bombed to
smithereens in the near future by the "Coalition of the Willing", and
so its oil, like that
of Iraq, will no longer be available. And then there is Saudi Arabia.
Maybe it will become unstable and thus it will also be necessary to
have it bombed to smithereens, so that all the oil there
also will no longer be available. Then there is Venezuela. Maybe it
will become "communist" (despite the fact that communism died out 15
years ago), and thus it might also need to be bombed to smithereens, so
that all the oil there also will no longer be available.
And so forth. And then there is the fact that Saudi oil is a bit
"heavier" than some other oils, making it somewhat more difficult to
refine, and thus it doesn't really count as being part of the true
resource, does it?
Am I being totally and irresponsibly
cynical when I
think that the price of oil is being artificially manipulated? Could it
be that the true reason for invading all of these oil producing
countries is not to be able to pump even more of it out of the ground
for the benefit of the big oil companies, but rather to prevent it being
pumped, so that
the price remains high, and those companies happily go from one year of
record profits to the next? This thought seems even more plausible when
I read that the proven oil reserves (which can be pumped at about the
cost of pumping oil at the present time - that is to say, almost zero)
are sufficient to last for the next 40 years at the present level of
world consumption. (There are almost arbitrarily many references for
this statement, usually distorting it in one way or another for some
sorts of "political" purposes in one direction or another. A rather
randomly chosen reference is here,
which seems to be a relatively neutral European forum for discussing
such questions.) This is the reason that the oil companies are not
wasting their money looking for new oil reserves at the present time.
Finding still more oil would only weaken their case for "peak oil". It
would be more difficult to generate the hysteria necessary to justify
the high prices of oil, thus their high profits.
Well, OK. Then recently, I read
something, I think
it was in the Guardian, where it was asserted that yes, there may be
lots of oil, but that is not the true point. The limitation is not how
much oil we can burn, but rather how much of this burning the earth can
cope with. Thus, if you are willing to accept the thoughts I have
written above, then you might say that even if the oil companies are
acting in an irresponsible way, causing untold thousands, even millions
of people to suffer horribly, to be killed, still it is a good thing,
for then less oil will be burned off into the atmosphere.
Leaving aside the morality, or lack of
morality, of
such a position, we seem to have come down to another theory. This
time, the theory is not concerned with the causes of various geological
phenomena within the earth. We are now concerned with the
meteorological phenomena in the air above the earth. How helpful it
would be if Alfred Wegener were here with us to discuss these things!
What is it that causes the ice ages? Or
the warm
periods of the earth?
Why were the canals of Amsterdam frozen when the great painters were
painting these winter scenes in the 17th century? And nobody noticed
any sun-spots during that period. Why was the earth so warm that lions
and other African animals were roaming the plains of England a few
thousand years ago? Perhaps the solar system was passing through a more
or less dense cloud of cosmic dust. Who knows? Why is the level of
carbon dioxide in the atmosphere increasing? Is it the burning of oil?
Or is it the burning of tropical forests, so that they cannot re-absorb
the carbon dioxide? How much is the ocean absorbing the carbon dioxide
in solution, to be later made into carbon-rich coral reefs by all that
coral? Or is the coral dying out? And what about the ozone hole? Or is
that another story, having to do with refrigerators? What about the
formation of clouds? Does more carbon dioxide increase the clouds,
reflecting more of the heat from the sun away from the earth, or does
it cause the clouds to reflect the warmth of the earth back to the
earth, increasing the "greenhouse effect"? Could it be that if all
those people in Brazil or Indonesia stop burning their forests and
instead plant lots of trees, then suddenly huge amounts of carbon
dioxide will be removed from the atmosphere, we will have a general
catastrophic drop in greenhouse gases, and all of this would lead to a
sudden ice age? Who knows? I certainly don't know.
It used to be said
that the bad weather was caused by all of this testing of atomic bombs
in the atmosphere. At least, thankfully, that effect has ceased for the
time being. I also read - in a peer reviewed professional journal! -
where a group of scientists asserted that the reason that most
tornadoes twist in a counter-clockwise direction in the northern
hemisphere is that cars drive on the right-hand side of the road. Thus,
as pairs of cars are constantly passing each other, they are each
producing little micro-twists in a counter-clockwise direction, which
all adds up, or something. I'm not sure if they showed that tornadoes
over England, or Japan, where cars drive on the left, are clockwise.
But I do remember that they said that their theory was supported by the
fact that there are fewer tornadoes on Sundays, showing that the fact
that fewer cars are driving on Sundays, thus producing fewer twists of
the air, is relevant to the theory of tornadoes. It seemed to me,
however, that a simpler explanation might be that the people who write
down the occurrence of tornadoes might tend not to be at work on
Sundays. Also, at least here in Germany, my observation is that all
those people who are working on weekdays, and they are thus unable to
drive their cars on those days, drive even more, and even faster, on
Sundays, thus increasing the incidence of these micro-twists.
I agree that smelly chemical factories
are bad. And
I also hate these people who put all their money into their stupid cars
and drive them too fast. What is worse than a modern urban street,
filled with loud cars and even louder trucks, filling the air with
choking fumes? But things are getting better, even for the poor people
who must live in these cities. The catastrophically dirty factories of
eastern Europe have largely closed down, and the ones which remain
often have filters in their chimneys. Almost all petrol cars have
catalyzers, and now the diesel cars and trucks are gradually being
forced to have filters. It is obvious to me that the air here in
Germany has improved tremendously in the last 25 years. In 1975 when I
first arrived here, there was often a smoggy haze in the air. Now I
never notice smog. It's just the normal autumn and winter fog which
gets us down. Sometimes the sunsets over north Germany are as clear as
they are in Australia. On a cloudless winter night, the sky is filled
with stars. So I am an optimist.
Whatever the true situation is with oil,
whether it
is mostly of biological origin, or mostly abiotic, it seems to me to be
difficult to imagine that natural gas has a biological origin. Does
anybody seriously believe that it has been trapped in such fortuitous
rock formations for hundreds
of
millions of years in the quantities we find it today?
Think
about Sumatra! A couple of years ago, we saw a huge earthquake and
tsunami off the
coast of Sumatra, and this brings to mind the fact that in the middle
of the island is perhaps the greatest volcano in the world, Toba, which
blew up just 70,000 years ago, causing a crater which is 60 or 70
kilometers across! Yet
Sumatra is one of the great oil producing, and especially natural gas
producing regions of the earth! How can we imagine that such a
geologically active region could have preserved such "fossil fuels" for
so long?
If we imagine that Toba blows up every
100,000 years
or so, then it will have blown up thousands of times between the
carboniferous age of geological time and today! How could the delicate
structures trapping this natural gas have survived such inconceivable
disruption? This idea
simply stretches all credulity beyond any reasonable bounds. In fact,
anybody who is prepared to take the trouble to think about it will
realize that the idea is simply ridiculous! It is
clear that not only helium, but lots of hydrogen as well is being
formed by the radioactive decay of heavy elements deep within the
earth. Such a volcanic region as Indonesia must owe its oil and gas
reserves to this volcanic activity.
In the end, all of this shows that there
seem to be
no grounds for panic when it comes to the sources of energy for our
everyday lives. And it also shows that atomic energy is not only
dangerous, highly polluting and much too expensive, but it is also
totally unnecessary. Furthermore, heating with natural gas, or having a
car propelled
by LPG, produces hardly any pollution.
What is the rate at which mineral oil
and natural
gas are being formed within the earth? Who knows. Maybe it is formed at
the same rate at which it is being pumped out of the earth today. Or
maybe it is only formed very slowly, so that after 100 or 200 years or
so, the deposits will have been emptied, and the rate of refilling will
be negligible. One way or another, surely a better solution would be
for the world to convert gradually to solar power, using the energy of
sunlight to produce hydrogen gas from water. That gas could then be
used in the same way natural gas is used today.