Andrew D. Todd -
10/10/2007
Well, I'm an engineer, not a geologist, but my understanding is that oil tends to get formed in sea bottoms, rather than on land (on top of the continental plates), where coal formation is more likely. The conditions of sea formation, from masses of dead plankton, would tend to lend themselves to sealing in the hydrogen. Various stages of coal formation (swamps, peat bogs, lignite, etc) are commonly found near the surface on land, gradually getting compressed and reducing their water content. Of course, over geologic time, most deep-sea bottoms tend to get subducted down into the earth's mantle, so oil is comparatively scarce on land or in shallow water. The Atlantic Ocean is _only_ about forty million years old, whereas the major fossil fuel sources are likely to be a couple of hundred million years old. Synfuel plants (Fischer-Tropf Process, Hydrocarb Process, etc.) which convert coal to oil, do so by simulating the conditions of temperature and pressure which would obtain if some organic matter were trapped about a mile down. In looking for natural sources of oil, you would be looking for the fairly rare condition where a piece of sea bottom wound up on dry land, buried to the right depth, and then, of course, you would be looking for a rock dome to contain it. The big point, however, is that you can always cook coal into liquid fuel if you want to, so you don't have to rely on geological accidents. You don't even need coal-- you can use biomass if you like. When you take account of externalities, synfuel is almost certainly cheaper than natural oil. Of course, it probably makes sense to go further, to electrically-powered transportation, in which case you don't need liquid fuel.
http://postmanpatel.blogspot.com/2006/07/chinese-announce-biomass-bio-oil.html
As it happened, the oil companies were formed by people who were rather like real estate speculators, or stock arbitragers, and their orientation was to find some place where they could buy oil rights at a ridiculously low price, in order to sell at a high price. The did not have the mentality of, say, a public utility company, or the Army Corps of Engineers. This meant that the oil companies would inevitably wind up in some kind of thieves' market. Russia is the latest thieves' market. The game is about making off with state property at less than replacement cost, with the assistance of Russians who want to escape from Russia.
The peak oil theory has some anachronistic baggage. It incorporates a hydraulic model of an oil well and drilling rig-- as they existed in the late 1950's when the theory was formulated. Nowadays, there are smart drilling rigs, which can easily steer to exact locations underground, using sonar to find their way. Such a drilling rig can honeycomb a well with all kinds of collection galleries, seek out and intercept natural channels within the rock, etc., and can do all this at quite low cost. A smart drilling rig cannot create oil where there is no oil, but it can make the business of collecting it much more like taking goods out of a warehouse. There is no longer any close relationship between current production and ultimate reserves. It is simply a question of how many years the owner of the oil well prefers to empty it in. If the owner is at all secretive, you cannot infer with any confidence how many years worth of oil he has left. If he wants to increase production at an exponential pace, and then, suddenly, without warning, run out completely, he can do just that.
What impresses me about Engdahl is that he is seeking for mathematical certainty about something which primarily involves the motives of other people. That puts him in the same basket as the "peak-oilers." That is, Engdahl says that the Russians are selling a lot of oil, and therefore they must have found an inexhaustible supply, and therefore the theory of "deep," or abiotic oil must be correct. A contrary interpretation would run as follows, that Russians are notoriously good "quick and dirty" engineers, with an eye to the main chance, and they may very well have figured out that there is a time limit to sell oil by, what with things like the ongoing growth of electronic communications, the spread of computerized manufacturing, the increasing importance of ecological concerns, etc. It may be that the Russians, looking beyond the current crisis, are determined to unload their oil while it is still worth something.
The net effect of the 1970's oil crisis was to substantially insulate the country's electricity supply from foreign affairs. Once the current oil crisis has run its course, the probable result will be to insulate the transportation energy supply from foreign affairs.
Mark Brady -
10/8/2007
Now that you mention it, I do remember, of course, reading that oil and coal came from vegetation, not dinosaurs. And one might guess that there were a lot more plants than dinosaurs in previous epochs.
However, how confidently may we write off a non-biologic origin of oil?
You write that "Predictions of how much oil exists and is recoverable at various costs does not depend on how oil is created." Certainly such predictions are a function of a number of factors, most notably the expected price of oil and anticipated recovery costs. That said, the preferred theory of how oil is created would impact on estimates of oil reserves and costs of recovery.
