[Conspiracy?] Fossil fuels have nothing to do with fossils…

Why would the energy companies want to sweep this under the rug? It just means that it can come from none organic substances deep down in the earth. Guess who's still gonna be the the ones finding and drilling them? Huge oil companies that just realized their compnay is gonnga be in business for an extra few years.

 

I am just as surprised as when I found out that baby oil isn't made out of babies. I think Americans are sick of these lies and should put an end to false advertising.

 

Um, the supply doesn't increase as OPEC and other major countries with oil them would still limit the supply so it's profitable.

 

It's pretty interesting, I've always had difficulty picturing piles of dinosaurs and trees rotting, then thousands of years later turning into oil

Nature is usually pretty good at cleaning up after herself

 

I always thought that the "fossil" describer had more to do with an "aging process" than with material composition....

 

a long time back...maybe a few years back..i posted an article with similar findings...it said that oil was a renewable source of energy, that we weren't necessarily staring at definite energy shortages.

i can't remember the source, though.

 

Seems simple enough.

 

Wired magazine had a lengthy article about a year or two ago.

 

KC,
Do you know anything about the *rate* of this proposed process? The reasons I would think the spike might not be totally artificial are these:

1. you're giving the oil industry too much credit for taking such new research to heart and abandoning the old ways of thinking.

2. oil really is getting harder and harder to extract. The actual costs of searching and extracting have gone up at an incredible rate over the last four decades.

So it would be interesting if this theory pans out, but it is probably too slow to matter than much, and anyway I'm hoping we figure out some alternative energy sources, for the overall good of the planet. I'm sure we're getting gouged a little, but I doubt it's from a place of intelligent cover-up.

 

oh come on b-bob u are taking away from the fun of a conspiracy theory. get out of here with your logic!!!

 

Seems to me that oil companies would be happy about the news and would want to tell people. Bush (and nearly everyone) right now wants to move to hydrogen fuel technology so we aren't dependent on OPEC and so we're not dependent on a depleting supply. If, with deep drilling (which sounds very hard btw) you could get it from almost anywhere, and there was a plentiful supply deep in the earth, we wouldn't have to ween ourselves off of oil after all.

 

crazy that we just mentioned this in our geology class 2 days ago. that water reaction with mantle material might create hydrocarbons. not sure if the prof got it from this, though, as it sounded like an idea that had been around for at least a little while the way he mentioned it.

it would be weird if the entire mantle could just generate oil but as B-Bob said, exactly how fast is it producing it. fast enough to keep up with how fast we're using it? wouldn't seem likely since all the other oil has come from several million to several hundred million years back and we're plowing through it. well, we're plowing through what we can recover, there's a buttload of it still in the ground even in the places that have been drilled.

also, are they saying if this process works then all of a sudden oil coming from organic material is no longer true? as in both can't happen?

i assume the theory of oil coming from organic material wasn't just thought up on a whim and has scientific backing. it may be hard to believe, but it's hard to believe the colorado river carved the f'ing grand canyon. but give nature a few million or few hundred million years to work on something and it can do some stuff. i would just think both processes are occuring.

i think our prof did mention something about some types of reservoirs regenerating their reserves somewhat and that's what led to this idea.


and yeah, i'd think oil companies would love the idea of being able to control the world's energy supply for a few more decades. soon i'll be working for them and controlling y'all one day.

 

I've talked to a few geologists and geophysicists here at work and they said this theory has been around since the 80's at least.

All the oil that is drilled today is from organic sources.

 

I know it's fun to say "let's burn some dinosaurs" when you want to go fast but the organic source for "fossil' fuels was mostly algae and diatoms that were deposited over a roughly a100 million year period about 300 million years ago. That was atleast 100 million years before there were any dinosaurs.

I don't see how questions about the the source for carboniferous fuels would constitute a conspiricy. No matter where it comes from you have to find it and make it available and that process is becoming ever more difficult and expensive although the examination of 3d seismic data with super computers is aiding the cause. I don't think anyone is implying that abiogenic sources would be producing a usable, inexhuastible supply at a rate exceeding mankind's use rate .

(Even if they were you still have to pay the price for releasing unlimited greenhouse gasses into the atmoshere)

 

It's been a long time since I had college organic chemistry but the common denominator in both methods appears to be the presence of carbon. The source in the inorganic method is Calcite or Calcium Carbonate- CaCO3. Calcite appears to be a very common mineral. I'd be curious if there was a statistical corelation between the surface presence of Calcite and where drilling has been performed or reserves are known to exist.

http://mineral.galleries.com/minerals/carbonat/calcite/calcite.htm

EDIT: One (admittedly uneducated) difference I see in the theories appears to be that one is from sediment (top-down) and the other is from the core outward (inside-out). In the inside-out core method, I'm curious how the newly formed methane doesn't ignite at the temperature and pressure needed to create it...?