Earth may be constantly producing oil

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Gold#Origins_of_petroleum

by yters • 17 years ago

13 54 17 years ago

en.wikipedia.org

pragmatic• 17 years ago

Gold proposed that the Earth may possess a virtually endless supply – suggesting as much as "at least 500 million years' worth of gas"

Wow.

eugenejen3• 17 years ago

I guess until the day we can drill oil/gas from Mars or Venus. Then we will know theory for the biogenic petroleum oil is not correct.

PieSquared• 17 years ago

There's no guarantee there's oil in either place. Remember, oil is the product of organic matter being compressed under heavy pressure for millions of years. Even if microbes or their remains are discovered on Mars or Venus, which they haven't (definitively), there's no guarantee that there was life of any considerable biomass.

So I really wouldn't get my hopes up for extraterrestrial oil at all, sad as that may be. On the other hand, minerals and metals most certainly exist outside of Earth, so...?

ilkhd2• 17 years ago

However, no matter how you try, capacity to absorb CO2 is finite.

radu_floricica• 17 years ago

AFAIK about this it's not as controversial as it sounds, with the caveat that the current rate of generation is way below what once was, or what we're consuming right now. In other words it's a very interesting scientific issue but with little practical consequence.

thelonecabbage• 17 years ago

The theory is predictive. It can be used with 67% accuracy to find new oil deposits. That is both falsifiable and HUGELY practical. The bulk of expense in oil extraction is finding the oil in the first place, which is why the Middle east is so attractive, it's all at the surface, shallow drilling and easy testing.

If this theory pans out, and as he says that oil is distributed all over the world; it means that oil gets MUCH cheaper and unstable regions can go F@#$ themselves, we'll just drill somewhere else.

brazzy8• 17 years ago

Where did you get that 67% number fromß

Chronos2• 17 years ago

Actually, it is rather controversial. Normally, when you add heat to a large hydrocarbon molecule, it cracks (breaks down into smaller pieces plus more heat). This is why hydrocarbons can catch fire and burn. Going the other direction -- from large molecules to even larger ones -- requires very specific heat ranges and very delicate conditions involving unusual catalysts. Add too much heat, and it cracks faster than it merges. Add too little heat, and it cracks instead of merging (if anything changes at all).

There are indeed specific conditions under which merging occurs, but in geology they are extremely rare. If abiogenic oil theory were true, it would predict abundant oil in Washington state (close, but not too close, to vulcanism) and zero oil in Texas (where there are no volcanoes). The facts are, of course, otherwise. The amount of naturally-occurring abiogenic oil is quite possibly non-zero, but clearly accounts for at most a tiny fraction of all naturally-occurring oil.

Even if abiogenic oil theory were true, we would still be experiencing peak oil. Assuming it were true, the earth would have been producing all our current global oil reserves over the course of billions of years, and our current rate of extraction would be depleting the reserves faster than abiogenic production could refill them. (Two arguments why abiogenic oil must be slow, even if it's significant: one, the annual rate of carbonate rock subduction is not sufficient to sustain the current annual rate of oil extraction, even with 100% conversion; two, the oil produced would have to go somewhere, e.g. break to the surface and feed an ecosystem of oil-digesting bacteria, if it were being produced at such a rapid rate.)

brazzy8• 17 years ago

Decades old crank theories are now hacker news?

windsurfer• 17 years ago

The article talks bout helium being present. How did it get there?

brazzy8• 17 years ago

Um... Helium's the second most common element, by a huge margin.

Chronos2• 17 years ago

Uh, it's a question with a well-known answer. When uranium and other heavy radioactive elements decay, they often do so via alpha decay. What's an alpha particle? Two neutrons, two protons. Eventually the alpha particle slows down and captures some electrons. What is it now? An atom of Helium-4.

If there is radioactive material buried in the earth (there is), and there are geological structures that trap it (there are), then there will be underground deposits of helium (specifically Helium-4).

Other than the fact that the same rocks trapping helium can also trap natural gas, though, there is absolutely no further relation between the two. Why would there be? Helium is also found with deposits of radon gas, where no methane is present. BFD.

gruseom• 17 years ago

Decades old crank theories are now hacker news?

This comment is a choice example of how ideologues drape themselves in (what they call) science. Whether he was right or wrong, no fair person could read that Wikipedia bio and come away thinking that Thomas Gold was a "crank".

brazzy8• 17 years ago

Actually, any fair person who read that article and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiogenic_petroleum_origin would have to come away thinking that the man was drifting quite deeply into crank territory, other scientific merits nonewithstanding. It's a continuum after all, and not uncommon for scientists to become obsessed with an idea.

eserorg• 17 years ago

If you study the history of the oil business, you will find that approximately every 25-30 years there is a widespread "oil crisis" precipitated by the conclusion that we have reached "peak oil" and that the world's aggregate hydrocarbon production is in decline.

The first such oil crisis occurred in the 1859. Before the first U.S. oil well was drilled in Pennsylvania in 1859, petroleum supplies were limited to crude oil that oozed to the surface. An 1859 advertisement for Kier’s Rock Oil advised consumers to “hurry, before this wonderful product is depleted from Nature’s laboratory.”

In 1874, the state geologist of Pennsylvania, the United States leading oil-producing state and the location of the world's first commercial oil well, estimated that only enough oil remained to keep the nation’s kerosene lamps burning for four years.

Seven such "peak oil" shortage scares occurred before 1950.

These periodic "peak oil" crises lead to short-term spikes in the spot prices for crude.

As a consequence, the capital markets flood the oil and gas business with capital to develop high-cost reserves that had been considered uneconomic. The vast inflows of capital into the Athabasca oil sands in Canada are an example of this.

If this "peak oil crisis" coincides with an era of cheap capital, the inflows of capital into industries that are perceived to be either compliments (oil sands, oil shale) and/or substitutes for crude oil (wind, solar, biofuels) can be extremely large.

Inevitably, this overallocation of capital leads to: (1) vast new discoveries of hydrocarbons, and (2) the invention of new technologies to economically develop those reserves.

Because the oil and gas industry is opaque in terms of information flows, it takes several years for news of these developments to recycle back into the capital markets.

In point of fact it was not until 2007-2008 that news began to percolate about the vast shale gas discoveries in the United States -- even though the first such monster wells had been drilled in 2000-2001.

States such as Pennsylvania, where oil and gas records are not made publicly available for a 5-year "grace" period, exacerbate this problem. In contrast, most states post updates on new oil and gas wells on a daily basis.

New investments in oil and gas technology can even turn around mature basins that had been considered to be past their peak production.

For example, according to the United States EIA (see here: http://www.eia.doe.gov/steo and here: http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/steo/pub/gifs/Fig12.gif), U.S. crude oil production increased this year to 5.24 million BOE (barrels of oil equivalent) per day -- the first annual increase since 1991.

The net effect is that supply vastly overshoots demand. There is a delayed recognition that the increase in the industry-average R/P ratio (the ratio of reserves-in-the-ground to production-per-year) no longer justifies continued investment.

As a result, crude oil prices crash. Those ventures into higher-cost technologies that had been launched with the presumption of hindsight that a new era of permanently higher oil prices had dawned, are deemed uneconomic. Examples include: oil sands, oil shale, photovoltaic utility-scale power plants, biofuels, wind energy.

Capital flees the market.

As the global economy continues to grow and capital remains unallocated to E&P of hydrocarbons (Exploration and production), the industry-average R/P ratio begins to slowly contract. New technologies that could be used to discover and produce untapped hydrocarbon reserves (Methane Hydrates, in the US Gulf of Mexico, for instance) remain undeveloped.

The energy industry refocuses on decreasing costs, instead of increasing supply.

After another 25 years, the cycle repeats.

(There are of-course short-term supply shocks that can occur for geopolitical reasons, such as wars, climate change legislation, nationalization of mineral rights, armed piracy on ocean shipping lanes, etc...)

In view of this history, presupposing a impeding permanent shortfall in global hydrocarbon supplies is akin to prognosticating the end-of-the road for Moore's Law and a subsequent end to the IT industry.

brazzy8• 17 years ago

Peak oil theory and short-term supply/demand cycles have absolutely nothing to do with each other. Peak oil theory was created by M. King Hubbert in the 1950s and accurately predicted local peak oil production for the US around 1970 (it has declined ever since since). It predicted a global peak "in about 50 years" - and there are strong indications that despite all efforts and high prices, global oil production has been stagnating or even declining for about 2 years now.

lsc6• 17 years ago

My dad is very interested in this peak oil movement. While they do have some good points (it's harder to extract the second half of oil from a well, doing the math on the energy it takes to extract a barrel of oil, etc..) they are missing some very important points.

1. Oil is not the only energy source. Sure, it is by far the best and most convenient source for transportation, but outside of transportation, almost all our power needs could be met by electricity. One can obtain electricity from many sources; Nuclear fission being the source I am most excited/hopeful about. Countries like France and Japan already meet almost all of their power needs with fission.

Also, many of the processes for extracting oil that are impractical if you use oil as the energy source to do the extraction, such as oil sands, become practical if you can use energy created by fission or coal or some other cheaper, more plentiful source.

2. oil demand is not inelastic. The automotive market of the last few years should make that clear. Sure, we'd all like giant luxury vehicles, but this is constrained by economics. Not only can we move from 12MPG SUVs to 50MPG compact hybrids, we can drive a lot less. Sure, I am going to drive to work every day; until it starts costing me more than I'm making, at which point I will obviously stop doing so. Oil demand is extremely elastic. I bet that when gas hits the equivalent of $10/gallon (meaning, in today's dollars) you will see the bottom 40-50% of the us population no longer driving.

Sure, I'm not going to be turning my servers off anytime soon, but that's mostly fission and coal, with some natural gas thrown in because California is weird and rich.

brazzy8• 17 years ago

Peak oil doesn't mean that all oil will suddenly be gone. It just means that constantly increasing demand cannot be satsfied forever. For well over a century, the rate of oil production and consumption has increased very quickly. It's physically impossible for this development to continue indefinitely, and no amount of hand-waving can change that.

New discoveries don't change that - you'd need more new discoveries each year than the year before (which is the opposite of what is actually happening). Oil sands don't change that - they don't just require more capital, but also more energy to use - and energy is exactly what you're trying to produce after all. Eventually we'll have to expend the equivalent 1 barrel of oil to mine and refine 2 barrels worth of oil sands.

Peak oil doesn't mean no more oil tomorrow. Oil production may well continue for a century or more - it will just keep decreasing, not increasing. When this starts happening is a matter of debates, research and numbers. There are strong indications that we are seeing it happen right now: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Hubbert_world_2004.png (look at the source - these are not made-up numbers)

lsc6• 17 years ago

Oil is not the only source of energy. Granted, it is one of the most convenient, but one could use energy from a fission plant to extract oil sands, etc...

If you don't care about the environment, there are even easier solutions; processes for making gas out of coal have been around since before world war 2.

netsp4• 17 years ago

That is true. Oil production doesn't even need to drop off very fast to produce drastic effects. The reason peak oil is taken so seriously is because of inelastic demand. Regardless of the cost of oil, we consume it in roughly equal amounts. This means that a small drop off in the production of oil could lead to incredibly high prices.

The reason that is bad is the same reason that demand for oil is inelastic. The cost of not consuming oil is very high.

joe_the_user4• 17 years ago

Wikipedia is not the best source. Not necessarily the worst either but still.

The phrase "Peak Oil" has become much more than a statement that at some point in time the human production of oil will. For example, one of the primary boosters of the phrase was the website "Dieoff.org" which anticipates the death of most people on the planet. And you've demonstrated this yourself by jumping to the Hubbert curve...

The thing about a Hubbert curve is that it is base on regional data. Production in various regions has, rather roughly, indeed expand exponentially and then gone down exponentially. But where this behavior has been roughly seen, the exponential decline has happened because the particular sources have been replaced by cheaper sources elsewhere. Since this cannot happen on a world scale, there is every reason to expect world-scale production on existing fields to go down gradually rather than exponentially. Further, as the GP notes, more oil is being discovered even into the declining range.

This relatively slow decline will provide some impetus for alternative energy sources - it already has to an extent.

The world has quite a few problems but approach that our "Peak Oil" friends use for framing these problems is not useful.

lupin_sansei7• 17 years ago

> It's physically impossible for this development to continue indefinitely

Why can't oil be made synthetically? Say by genetically engineering bacteria etc. That being the case I don't see any limit to oil production

joe_the_user4• 17 years ago

Another interesting thing this peak oil/anti-peak oil debate shows to me is the difficulty of factoring secular and cyclical processes together.

Yes, oil production will peak at some point is the too terribly distant future, but no, the pattern of decreased oil consumption won't be the same as the patter of increased oil consumption because the factors generating the decline won't be the same as the factors that generated rise.

bokonist• 17 years ago

Given the correlation between gold and oil ( http://goldnews.bullionvault.com/files/OilGold2.png ), two commodities that have nothing in common, I think that the rise and crash of crude prices has a lot more to do with fluctuations in the dollar, rather than the underlying economics of oil.

joe_the_user4• 17 years ago

The increase price of oil is indeed very driven also by massively inflationary US policy.

Tichy• 17 years ago

"Inevitably, this overallocation of capital leads to: (1) vast new discoveries of hydrocarbons, and (2) the invention of new technologies to economically develop those reserves."

Scientific much? It seems a very broad generalization that there will always be a way out, just because it was the case before.

joe_the_user4• 17 years ago

I don't actually buy the line of Peak Oil appearing suddenly and leading to the end of civilization as we know it. I've heard the 'economic frontier' argument before too.

But I don't think anyone thinks there's infinite amount of oil in the ground, so a peak of some sort, at some time is predicted by everyone serious, including the US Department of Energy.

Now, the Hulbert curve only has it's shape because decaying deposits are replaced by less expensive deposits elsewhere. So if there actually is a decline in total deposits, it's logical to expect the decline to no longer be exponential but more gradual. Indeed, a lot of the increased US production is coming from the increased price but it's still limited by the total amount in the ground at any price.

By the way, Moore's law has broken down for processor speeds. It hasn't broken for the other components but without increased speed, more transistors aren't necessarily instantly usable. This, again, won't lead to instant Armageddon but it's problem, Intel can see it's a problem and is working on improved parallel processing - but we know there are serious limits to this. Ironically, huge but not necessarily faster processor are what's needed to do massive simulations of the human brain. But these won't necessarily sell another round of Windows upgrades (at least not tell the simulations work convincingly...)

Anyway, let's not make hysterical doom-sayers lead us to act like there will be no problems in the future.

jseliger• 17 years ago

Problem is, just because people have cried wolf twice doesn't mean that the third time the wolf won't be at the door. And the long-term absolute price of oil is steadily rising: there's a boom, which you note, then a bust, which usually leaves oil at a higher "steady" price than before the boom.

lupin_sansei7• 17 years ago

How many mistaken cries of wolf would it take for you to think the wolf cryers are mistaken though? 5? 10? 20?

pingswept• 17 years ago

I've studied the history of the oil business, but my findings are totally different from yours.

Look at the price history-- there is no 25 or 30 year cycle of crude oil crashes beyond the gap from 1979 to the mid-2000's. We can all confirm this for ourselves here: http://www.inflationdata.com/inflation/images/charts/Oil/Inf...

and here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Oil_Prices_1861_2007.svg

You can see that the price stayed within a factor of 2 of its average price (around $20 in 2009 currency) for roughly 100 years. Furthermore, before World War I, coal was our primary energy source-- less than 20% of our global energy usage came from oil before 1920. To say that the oil industry has had the same drivers as it's changed from being just a source of kerosene to the primary world energy source is inaccurate.

Incidentally I do agree that "presupposing a [sic] impeding [sic] permanent shortfall in global hydrocarbon supplies" is likely to be a poor idea, but not for the reasons you state. I think it's a bad idea because the actual history of oil has been so unpredictable, so acyclic.

steveplace• 17 years ago

It's not about peak oil.

It's about peak cheap oil.

lupin_sansei7• 17 years ago

The essential problem with the Peak Oil theory is that although it correctly understands that oil prices will rise as oil gets more scarce, it doesn't recognise that higher prices cause a change in people's behaviour that causes more oil to be made available. (More exploration, better extraction methods, substitution with alternative energy sources, conservation of existing oil usage). All the oil we have is because the high prices of oil have caused people to go and look for it in the first place.

High prices are a signal to society that we need more of something. If/when oil prices rise it automatically moves people into the energy business in order to solve the high oil price problem.

The late economist Julian Simon has a terrific book about these issues: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ultimate_Resource

See also the "Conservation of Resources" section here: http://mises.org/rothbard/newlibertywhole.asp#p242

jodrellblank• 17 years ago

Inevitably, this overallocation of capital leads to: (1) vast new discoveries of hydrocarbons

Inevitably? All we have to do is spend money and we will find more oil? Forever?

Phew!

People who said there was enough oil for four years were wrong. People who say there is a finite amount of oil are right.

There is a difference - we are burning through a finite amount of oil at increasing rates, once it's run out that's it. Moore's Observation could stop tomorrow with Intel saying "we can't fit any more transistors into a chip" yet there would still be room for optimising the transistor layout and CPU internal design, the temperature of operation and resulting clock speeds, multiple CPU arrangements, and software and peripherals. The IT industry depends on computers being useful to businesses, not on them having more transistor density in a chip.

What are you arguing - that the use of remaining oil reserves is difficult to predict, that it's impossible to predict or that it's useless to predict?

projectileboy• 17 years ago

Agreed. Thank you for a well-written analysis. As a practical matter, however, there is a finite supply of oil. Doesn't it seem irresponsible to ignore the inevitable consequences of increasing demand for a dwindling supply? (I'm talking on the scale of decades, mind you.)

Earth may be constantly producing oil

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