Natural petroleum seeps

It wasn't dinosaurs, but it was originally shallow plankton-like organisms. The bogs were eventually buried in sediment (the bogs were near coastlines and in shallow seas). But plate movement moves the areas around, sea level changes with times, and there is vertical crust movement in subduction zones.

I don't see any mention of abiotic sources- seems the item talks about biological origins. Or is it in something other than the first item?

On the web, Abiotic Oil.

Gold, silver, diamonds, platium, and so on.I don't think it is such a far reach that Earth creates natural oil too.I doubt if we will ever run out of oil. cuhulin

Oh, it's creating it, the problem is we're using it way faster than it's being created.

This is bad, since oil is wonderful stuff for making lubricants and plastics from.... there are other ways to get energy, but it's hard to beat petroleum solvents.

--scott

snipped-for-privacy@webtv.net wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@storefull-3171.bay.webtv.net:

I believe that members of the former Bush adminstration believed this to be true too. The scientists laughed their asses off at them as I recall. Oil is made from *organic* matter that has been treated with pressure and possibly heat. I believe they're unsure whether it was plants, algae or animal matter, but the cycle of generation is *extremely* long. On the order of millions of years.

However it is possible that there is more (a finite non-growing amount) between where people drill down to now and where oil would be gaseous due to heat fro the earth's core. There's also tar sands which you literally have to steam to separate the oil from. There is nothing else.

It has been accepted that abiogenic oil production does happen.

Lollar, Sherwood et al. 2002. Abiogenic formation of alkanes in the Earth's crust as a minor source for global hydrocarbon reservoirs. Nature, 416, pp522-524.

Right. And lets says that a significant portion of our oil reserves is of an abiotic origin. The next question is: How fast is it seeping up into exploitable underground reservoirs?

The deep hydrocarbons percolate up through rock (from either a biological or non biological source) until they reach an impermeable layer (usually shaped like an inverted dome). Outside if these pools, the concentration moving through the rock is very low. And depleted reservoirs don't appear to be refilling at a significant rate.

s/dome/bowl/

Bret wrote in news:113wji21fjmq1$. snipped-for-privacy@40tude.net:

By a small minority of scientists. Probably those whose company policy dictates the same. The same sort of numbers that don't support evolution and global warming I'd imagine. Entirely possibly the same people in most cases.

fred wrote in news:Xns9C0EAFA2FACD6fred@127.0.0.1:

The germ theory of disease was accepted by an /extremely small/ minority of scientists in the 1860s. Now it is accepted by everyone except African tribal witch doctors.

The heliocentric theory of the solar system was accepted by something like two scientists in the 1600s. Now it is accepted by everyone except African tribal witch doctors.

Consensus is not science. Never has been, never will be.

You're aware the head of the IPCC himself has admitted that there's been no global warming since 1998?

Ad hominem attack. Typical.

There is little doubt that this could occur, chemically, but I doubt it is a significant source of hydrocarbons on this planet.

There probably would have been no significant carboniferous deposits at all had it not been for living organisms.

Tegger wrote in news:Xns9C0EC207B8AFBtegger@208.90.168.18:

Before Evolution, proper biology and the scientific method being endemic. Not surprising.

A bit inaccurate there for several reasons: it was of the *universe*, not just the solar system. As to who believed it - virtually anyone educated believed it, but if you were catholic, you weren't allowed to say so in public. That's what got Galileo in trouble, not that he believed it or even offered evidence of it, but that he published a book on it and went around screaming at anyone who wouldn't run away at the sight of him .

Consensus of *scientists* is a pretty good inication though. Consensus of the general public belongs on Entertainment Tonight - for its humor value.

It doesn't seem to say what academic qualifications he has - *actual* not honorary I mean. His website - linked there says that he has "a Masters in Industrial Engineering and became doubly a Doctor -with a PhD in Industrial Engineering and another in Economics from North Carolina State University."

Not exactly a qualified scientist. Far from it.

No, a generalization of the basis of the level of education/intelligence that leads to the aforementioned beliefs.

Yup, but as soon as Lister and Pasteur actually showed a benefit from the theory, and showed reasonable applications, it took off like wildfire. It doesn't take much for a theory to gain wide acceptance when it's fairly easy to demonstrate how it works.

No, not at all. By the 1600s, the heliocentric theory was considered reasonable by most astronomers, and they used it because it made the math easier. Maybe some of them might have hemmed and hawed and said that it was a "convenient fiction for more ready calculation" but the simplified orbit calculations were very clear and obvious. The lack of acceptance here wasn't on the part of scientists.

Once people actually started _calculating_ orbits, it became very clear that it was easier to treat the solar system _as if_ the sun was at the center for the purpose of calculation. It is a small step from there to saying the sun _really is_ at the center, and that's what the Pope objected to.

That's true, but again we can look at actual measurements and see what is going on. We can't necessarily tell what is causing it, but like with the heliocentric solar system, we can tend toward the simplest explanation probably being correct. There are occasionally exceptions of Occam's Razor but they are remarkably rare.

--scott

Obama is clueless re: fuel economy standards, but killing hydrogen is a good thing. Hydrogen isn't a fuel, only a (very unwieldy and dangerous) battery, and we already have more efficient batteries.

nate

man of mach> did anyone notice the raise of gas prices after obama vetoed the

"man of machines" wrote in news:90071$4a1864be$d8ea7ed5$ snipped-for-privacy@123.NET:

You're aware there's no such thing as "zero emissions"?

Here we go again.

Oil companies do not "set" or "raise" prices.

Commodity prices are the product of open-market activity, from which oil companies both benefit and suffer. This is quite true even for such thuggish state oil producers as Venezuela, Russia and Saudi Arabia.

The fatal flaw of democracy is amply demonstrated by the /constant/ need to point out very simple facts to people who understand very little, have little to no desire to learn, but who can still VOTE, in spite of their lack of understanding.

This is why democratic governments work best when they don't actually DO very much.

Sadly, we don't have more efficient batteries. Actual power density of gasoline is a whole lot better than any battery today, unfortunately.

Hydrogen _could_ be a solution, but as you point out it is currently very unweildy and dangerous. Gasoline used to be that way too, and it took a lot of engineering and years of development to make it as safe as it is today. Even so, gasoline is still pretty scary.

I saw the gas tank on a pickup truck ignite on the Washington Beltway once, and it was very impressive to see just how damn much energy is in a tank of gas, and terrifying to see what happens when all that energy comes out at once. This is the good side AND the bad side of high energy density storage systems.

I do agree that more battery research is more likely to be a long-term solution, but my record for technology predictions is very poor.

--scott

My point was not that hydrogen is dangerous to handle; my point was that hydrogen is produced by using electricity, which has to get power from somewhere. Molecular hydrogen simply does not naturally exist, at least not on earth. There is no mining, drilling, whatever for hydrogen - it needs to be produced; and therefore is subject to the laws of thermodynamics in that the energy that you expend to produce the hydrogen is going to be greater than that which you receive from burning it.

nate

Right, it's a power storage system. BUT, if you burn coal and you make hydrogen from it, the weight of the hydrogen is a whole lot less than the weight of the batteries you'd need to store the equivalent energy.

So... it's pretty damn good power storage system. It's not the marvelous energy source some people have claimed.... it's not an energy source at all... but it's a convenient way to get a lot of power from an electrical source into a small package that can run existing technology engines.

--scott