The theory of fossil fuels was quickly adopted by western geologists shortly after the discovery of oil in the 1860s. With this discovery, we presumed that petroleum is an exhaustible reserve. In the last few years we came up with other reasons to expedite our shift to other sources of energy: global warming has received serious academic, social and political attention and we therefore have to take more proactive measures to reduce, eliminate or even reverse our carbon emissions. Tremendous growth in the demand for energy by developing nations exasperated by political conflicts, war, and speculative trading in petroleum markets sent oil and other global commodities to record prices (which can also be easily argued as one of the many reasons for the credit crisis). Just all more reasons to neglect these limited, bloody, dirty and costly, energy supplies and focus on more sustainable, possibly cheaper alternatives in solar, nuclear, geothermal and hydroelectric energy; carbon quenching and remediation technologies.
But what if we are actually not running out of oil?
The provocative abiogenic or deep-earth gas theory for petroleum goes against traditional belief that crude oil, natural gas and coal are actually fossil fuels. Instead they existed ever since the accretion of the earth in vast quantities, 300 kilometers from the surface where their buoyancy allows them trickle up to the edges of the crust, about 1 kilometer from the surface where we drill and produce it commercially. Thomas Gold was the first person to really document this theory in the late 1970s, although it received earlier consideration behind the closed doors of the Soviet Union, where both sides of the debate were still being considered, mainly because the revered Russian chemist Mendeleyev supported the deep-earth theory. The evidence that supports Gold’s theory is overwhelming and stretches to explain geochemical observations that the theory of fossil fuels simply can’t. These include the presence of helium, nickel and vanadium in petroleum, the formation of diamond, and concentrated heavy metal ores like iron, gold, silver and zinc.
Because Gold refuted the argument from fossil fuels, he now had to explain the observed biological activity in non-biological petroleum. He proposed what he coined the Deep Hot Biosphere. As opposed to surface life, subsurface life does not have access to sunlight and therefore its source of energy must work in a very different way, nevertheless life as we know it requires oxygen and a rich source of carbon. He proposed that subsurface microbes can feed of oxygen that is readily available in rocks and in the oceans where it can leak between cracks in the crust. The only missing ingredient here is of course a food source of carbon, which Gold argued to be the deep-earth gas that is trickling to the surface, mainly in the form of methane gas. Evidence for subsurface geothermal life has been widely observed in ocean vents and active subsea volcanoes. Of course this new phenomenon, that an ecosystem can fully support itself without solar energy, found ways to excite the prospects of life on planets that receive too little or too much solar radiation (like for example our sister planets Venus and Mars).
In 1983, Gold had the opportunity to present his ideas on deep-earth gas and the deep hot biosphere to the senior officials of the Swedish State Power Board. He challenged that because the biogenic theory assumes that petroleum can only become concentrated in the pore spaces between sedimentary rocks, it would make no sense to find petroleum deep within hard, Swedish granite. They drilled for four years in the Sijlan ring and reached a maximum depth of 6.7km where they discovered hydrocarbon chemicals distributed as expected. Not very surprisingly after the findings of the Sijlan Experiment, the Russians drilled more than three hundred deep holes in bedrock areas, and as deep as 11 kilometers to discover serious inventories of hydrocarbons. The prospects of new petroleum developments exploded, especially in the former Soviet Union countries Ukraine and Russia.
Aside from all this overwhelming evidence, one might think that the poor geological guess work on oil reserves should also be considered as credible evidence for the deep-earth gas theory. The producing fields of the Middle East, where the phenomenon of petroleum reservoirs that seem to refill themselves, sometimes at rates similar to at which they are being depleted has been widely observed, and interestingly enough has absolutely no "fossil fuel" explanation. In 1970, it was believed that the entire region only had another few decades of oil reserves. Today Kuwait, which is only the Middle East’s third largest producer of crude oil, estimates over a century of reserves at current production amounts, about two times greater than they were in the 70s and expected to double again by 2020.
It is important to consider Gold’s theories in light of our strategies in regulating carbon emissions. We need to be able to transfer to renewable sources of energy before we run out of oil, because that day is highly likely not waiting to come.
Thomas Gold was a Jewish-Austrian born, professor of astrophysics and astronomy at Cornell University and a member of the National Academy of Sciences and Fellow of the Royal Society in London. He died in 2004.
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