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Wednesday, May 28, 2008

Drinking the "Peak Oil" Kool-Aid

In a brief posting today, I just wanted to point out that the term "fossil fuel" is really nothing but a theory. There is no absolute proof that oil derives from dead dinosaurs or other ancient biomass. In fact, there's a fair bit of evidence that oil is created by geologic processes deep within the earth's crust. Thomas Gold wrote about this alternative theory before knowing that the Russians had already come up with it themselves. That's what he claimed anyway, some people think that he plagiarized. Gold predicted that this theory would show microbes living deep within the earth, and recently more evidence in support of that keeps appearing.

If Gold and the Russians are correct, then oil may be extremely plentiful at layers below the crystalline basement, extractable by deep drilling. Russia sure has been successful at finding new oil in strange places. More reading on the subject here.

By making us all believe that oil is limited and is reaching a peak in production, the oil conglomerates can keep the "black gold" speculators on board thus keeping oil prices high and protect their obscene profits. They will likely seek to squash any information or theories which tend to make oil possibly be much more plentiful than they want us to think.

4 comments:

Andrew said...

Peak oil has been talked about since I was in high school in the 80's, so when is it actually supposed to happen? Who knows?

Jim Somerville said...

Another point which is often not mentioned is that drained oil wells often slowly start to refill. If you believe Gold and the Russians, then the oil slowly is seeping up through the deep fissures from whence it came originally. If you believe the fossilists, then it is coming from other nearby connected deposits. So why don't they drill for those deposits?

neihls said...

If all oil comes from ancient biomass, at least there's a limit to the amount of carbon we can "drive" into the atmosphere. If it's of geologic or deep-microbial origin, imagine... we could create another Venus!

Or is global warming just another bookend to the oil conglomerates' library of lies?

Jim Somerville said...

Here's more reading on the subject....apparently the estimation of reserves is very conservative.

http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-change/oil-shortage-a-myth-says-industry-insider-842778.html