We have more oil than we can use?????

Boca Raton News carries this interesting article. Dubious?

Among many cultural truisms is that Mickey and Minnie have never slept together, that The Donald will get married again, and that oil is organic, resulting from the earth’s pressure compressing dinosaurs and dead plants.

Nobody believes the first, the jury is still out on the second, but there’s a growing body of thought and evidence that oil is not a "fossil fuel" – that it is, in fact, a renewable resource, one that is being renewed all the time.

"Eventually the world will run out of oil. That doesn’t mean we will all freeze to death in the dark. It simply means that we will pay a lot more for energy," said Dr. Michael K. Evans, president of the Evans Group, an economics-consulting firm in Boca Raton.

President Bush himself has said, "The end of the Oil Age is in sight, and what people need to hear loud and clear is that we’re running out of energy in America."

But what if oil were, in fact, a renewable energy resource? Can you say OPEC heart attack?

Conventional wisdom for three centuries holds that the world’s supply of oil is finite, and that it was deposited in horizontal reservoirs near the earth’s surface in a process that took millions of years.

The theory originated in Russia. Oil originates “as tiny bodies of animals buried in the sediments which, under the influence of increased temperature and pressure acting during an unimaginably long period of time, transform into rock oil,” said Mikhailo Lononosov in 1757. And with relatively little research beyond that thought-to-be common sense assertion, the fossil fuel theory has been parked in our garages ever since.

Enter the word “abiogenic” – defined as “not produced by living organisms”

For more than 50 years, Russian and Ukrainian scientists have been working on a theory that oil is continuously generated by natural processes in the earth’s magma. The theory was first articulated in the Western world following publication of Thomas Gold’s book “The Deep, Hot Biosphere” in 1999. Oil is a “renewable, primordial soup continually manufactured by the earth under ultra-hot conditions and tremendous pressures. As this substance migrates toward the surface, it is attacked by bacteria, making it appear to have an organic origin dating back to the dinosaurs,” Gold wrote.

“It could be,” said Dr. Jean Whelan, a geochemist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts. “Some sites, particularly where there is a lot of faulting in the rock, a reservoir from which oil is being pumped, might be a steady-state system – one that is replenished by deeper reserves as fast as oil is pumped out.”

Gulf Coast

Russian petroleum geologists say that the discovery of oil deep in the Baltic Shield points conclusively to an abiogenic origin of oil, according to Gold’s book. But you don’t have to go all the way to the Baltic Sea to witness this phenomenon. Just go to Eugene Island, a submerged mountain in the Gulf of Mexico about 80 miles off the Louisiana coast. In support of the many years of Russian and Ukrainian research, and of the conclusions reached in Gold’s book, one oil field there has increased its production dramatically.

Eugene Island 330 began producing about 15,000 barrels of oil per day in the early 1970s. By 1989, the flow had dropped to 4,000 barrels per day. Then, suddenly, production skyrocketed to 13,000 barrels. In addition, estimated reserves went from 60 to 400 million barrels.

But even more suggestive that the fossil fuel theory is incorrect was the discovery that the geological age of the most recent oil taken out of Eugene Island is radically different from the oil taken out 10 years ago. Similar results have been seen at other Gulf of Mexico oil wells, at oil fields in Alaska, and in Uzbekistan.

Continues

Not everyone agrees: “I have grave doubts” about an abiogenic origin for oil, said Stephan Richter, president of the Globalist Research Center.

And the current oil industry in general seems to believe that oil production has peaked, with some economists arguing that skyrocketing oil prices signify the industry getting as much as it can while it can.

Other energy experts say oil’s decline will mean that coal will make a comeback and that the process by which the Nazis turned coal into gasoline to keep its Panzers running during WW II might arise again. And others argue that nuclear power will be rolled out again, and despite the protests, will go online as necessity overrides environmentalist opposition.

“The only real opponents to this story (of abiogenic origin) are in Western Europe and in the United States, and they are the professional petroleum geologists,” said Dr. Gold, a retired Cornell University professor. The debate continues.