Sustainable oil?

[alaric]

I came across this article today and I thought I would post it here to see if anybody could verify it's claims.

The article proposes that crude oil may not be a byproduct of organic degradation after all, but rather it might be part of a natural inorganic geologic process.

Sustainable Oil?

I suppose this is possible, but I really have no background in chemistry/organic chemistry so I can't say for sure either way.

[Brain]

well the chemistry behind it is sound. we know that because if it wasn't we wouldn't have ever heard about it. the issue here would be volume of methane.

in order to produce a usable carbon molecule (i'll pick octane which is common gasoline or petrol depending where you live)  you need to have the requisite number of carbon atoms, meaning that i'll need 8 methane atoms in order to get enough carbon to make my octane molecule. organic based molecules contain a huge amount of carbon compared to methane. 2 simple sugar molecules are all that is necessary to create an octane molecule, and a single protein or hormone can have enough carbon to create several to several dozen octane molecules. DNA contains enough to make several orders of magnitude more (this is assuming a perfect conversion ratio and that the conversion could actually happen due to thermodynamics, entropy, and molecular bonding rules which i will not go into here.)  the molecular structure of one strand of DNA is much more compact than the equivalent amount of methane for a given amount of carbon at standard temperature and pressure (1 atmosphere and about 20 C, i believe) therefore the amount of methane necessary to create these crude oil reserves would have to be absolutely staggering.

either way, this does not mean that oil has suddenly become a sustainable resource. IF this theory is true, it only means that the world's crude supply have become substantially larger. it will take many many thousands of years for the carbon that is now on the surface to descend to the depths necessary for oil formation, if it does at all

[Ssickboy]

"If  Dr. Gold and Dr. Kenney are correct, this "the end of the world as we know it" scenario simply won't happen.  Think about it ... while not inexhaustible, deep Earth reserves of inorganic crude oil and commercially feasible extraction would provide the world with generations of low-cost fuel. Dr. Gold has been quoted saying that current worldwide reserves of crude oil could be off by a factor of over 100."


interesting info.  There may still be one big problem at the moment.  No matter how much oil is reserved in the deep deep layers of the earth, unless they can manage a way to extract it at levels high enough to meet and beat consumption we may still have an oil crisis.

And either way, i'm very surprised that we know so little about oil.