ABIOTIC OIL FORMATION THEORY

While Western scientist universally held that all oil and gas is derived from fossil fuels, Russian and Ukrainian Scientist have tenaciously propounded that oil and gas are abiotic and can be found in very large amounts deep below the surface of the earth in most part of the world. Since the mid-19th century, a small but enthusiastic minority of these scientists have argued that petroleum and other fuels are formed by purely chemical or abiogenic processes hundreds of miles inside Earth. An early champion was the Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleyev, pioneer of the periodic table that hangs on the wall of virtually every high school chemistry classroom. Russia claims to have successfully drilled over 300 ultra-deep oil and gas wells through granitic and basalt based on abiogenic (abiotic) theory of oil and gas formation.⁽¹⁾

An abiogenic theory of petroleum formation is not new, dating from the 16^th century. In the 19^th century two very accomplished scientists, Alexander von Humboldt and Dimitri Mendeleev advanced the concept. In the 20^th century the Russian- Ukrainian School of geology emerged in the Soviet Union to vigorously formulate the modern theory of abiogenic (abiotic) oil and gas. In the West, the most eloquent and determined proponent was the famous astronomer Thomas Gold. After his death, Jack Kenney of Gas Resources Corporation has become the leading Western exponent. The prevailing abiotic theory is that the full complement of hydrocarbons found in oil and gas are generated in the mantle (40 to 90 miles below the surface of the earth) by non-biological processes. These hydrocarbons then migrate out of the mantle into the crust where they escape or are trapped by impermeable strata that lead to reservoir formation.

Evidences supporting Abiotic Theory: ⁽²⁾

• Oil being discovered at 30,000 feet, far below the 18,000 feet where organic matter is no longer found.
• Wells pumped dry later replenished.
• Volume of oil pumped thus far not accountable from organic material alone according to present models.
• In Situ production of methane under the conditions that exist in the Earth's upper mantle.

Specific examples cited for evidence of Abiotic oil are the impressive recharging from below, of the Eugene Island field (wells in deep decline exhibiting sharply increased production; recovery far in excess of  estimated remaining reserves) off new Orleans; the White Tiger oil field in Vietnam (discovered by a Russian company, Vietsovpetro) in fractured basement granite; the Panhandle-Hugoton field (high helium content) in Teaxs-Oklahoma, the Shengli Field and Songliao Basin in Northeastern China (supposedly mantle derived natural gas), and the well known Chimaera natural gas seep in Turkey. This seep has been known to be continuously active for thousands of years and represents the largest cataloged emission of abiogenic methane on land. The vast amounts of methane released by the biggest mud volcano eruptions are allegedly greater than found in the most abundant natural gas fields in commercial production. The presence of considerable amounts of hydrocarbons not associated with tectonic structures is also presented as evidence and, of course, the enormous methane hydrate deposits found all over the world are asserted to be of abiogenic origin. Finally, theory avers that the impressive record of recent ultra-deep drilling in the Gulf of Mexico supports their idea.

Between 1976 and 1996, estimated global oil reserves grew 72%, to 1.04 trillion barrels. Most of the geologists are hard-pressed to explain why the world's greatest oil pool, the Middle East, has more than doubled its reserves in the past 20 years, despite half a century of intense exploitation and relatively few new discoveries. It would take a pretty big pile of dead dinosaurs and prehistoric plants to account for the estimated 660 billion barrels of oil in the region, notes Norman Hyne, a professor at the University of Tulsa in Oklahoma. "Off-the-wall theories often turn out to be right," he says.

Thomas Gold, a respected astronomer and professor emeritus at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., has held for years that oil is actually renewable, primordial syrup 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. ⁽³⁾

Is There Any Real Shortage of Oil? ⁽⁴⁾

The Peak Oil Theory was largely the invention of geophysicist M. King Hubbert, with his prediction "that the fossil fuel era would be of very short duration." He originally published a world production curve on the theory in 1956, using the prediction that the world oil production would peak in 1970. That prediction of course proved to be quite untrue. The overwhelming preponderance of geological evidence compels the conclusion that crude oil and natural petroleum gas have no intrinsic connection with biological matter originating near the surface of the Earth. They are primordial materials which have been erupted from great depths. Statistical thermodynamic analysis has established clearly that hydrocarbon molecules which comprise petroleum require very high pressures for their spontaneous formation, comparable to the pressures required for the same of diamond. In that sense, hydrocarbon molecules are the high-pressure polymorphs of the reduced carbon system as is diamond of elemental carbon. Also, by 1994, the Russian and Ukrainian scientists were responsible for the discovery and development of "eleven major and one giant oil and gas fields ... in a region which had, forty years ago, been condemned [based on the fossil fuel theory] as possessing no potential for petroleum production".

In a recent discussion, Vladimir Kutcherov, Professor at the Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden and the Russian State University of Oil and Gas, predicted that the present oil spill flooding the Gulf Coast shores of the United States “could go on for years and years … many years.” [If the spill is not properly handled] According to Kutcherov, a leading specialist in the theory of abiogenic deep origin of petroleum, “What BP drilled into was what we call a ‘migration channel,’ a deep fault on which hydrocarbons generated in the depth of our planet migrate to the crust and are accumulated in rocks, something like Ghawar in Saudi Arabia.” Ghawar, the world’s most prolific oilfield has been producing millions of barrels daily for almost 70 years with no end in sight. According to the abiotic science, Ghawar like all elephant and giant oil and gas deposits all over the world is located on a migration channel similar to that in the oil-rich Gulf of Mexico.

The following is from an article, Oil without End ⁽⁵⁾: "With the White Tiger Field in Vietnam, 90% of the production is coming from basement rock, where there were never any fossils," argues C. Warren Hunt, a geologist in Calgary. "What they've been teaching us in school about oil coming from fossils is wrong."

Until a decade or so ago virtually all oil discovered was in the range of 5-10 miles into the crust. Yet recently, the Russians have discovered major oil pockets as far down as 40 miles. That amazing depth is far deeper than any prehistoric remains of animals and plants would ever be found. Using a supercomputer, the team recreated the conditions deep under the surface of the Earth and discovered that when subjected to a pressure of 50,000 times greater than the surface atmospheric pressure and heat higher than 2,400 degrees Fahrenheit a fusion process occurs. At 70 miles down they found that methane molecules can fuse with hydrocarbons and produce petroleum.

Considerations about recent predictions of impending shortages of petroleum evaluated from the perspective of modern petroleum science ⁽⁶⁾

The modern Russian-Ukrainian theory of deep, abiotic petroleum origins is neither the work  of any one single man nor of a few men. The modern theory was developed by hundreds of scientists in the (now former) U.S.S.R., including many of the finest geologists, geochemists, geophysicists, and thermodynamicists of that country. There have now been more than two generations of geologists, geophysicists, chemists, and other scientists in the U.S.S.R. who have worked upon and contributed to the development of the modern theory. (Kropotkin 1956; Anisimov, Vasilyev et al. 1959; Kudryavtsev 1959; Porfir'yev 1959; Kudryavtsev 1963; Raznitsyn 1963; Krayushkin 1965; Markevich 1966; Dolenko 1968; Dolenko 1971; Linetskii 1974; Letnikov, Karpov et al. 1977; Porfir'yev and Klochko 1981; Krayushkin 1984)

Academician Professor Vladimir B. Porfir’yev, senior petroleum exploration geologist for the U.S.S.R., at the All-Union Conference on Petroleum and Petroleum Geology, Moscow, 1956 has said that the overwhelming preponderance of geological evidence compels the conclusion that crude oil and natural petroleum gas have no intrinsic connection with biological matter originating near the surface of the Earth. They are primordial materials which have been erupted from great depths.

Professor Emmanuil B. Chekaliuk, at All-Union Conference on Petroleum and Petroleum Geology, Moscow, 1968 had stated that "Statistical thermodynamic analysis has established clearly that hydrocarbon molecules which comprise petroleum require very high pressures for their spontaneous formation, comparable to the pressures required for the same of diamond. In that sense, hydrocarbon molecules are the high-pressure polymorphs of the reduced carbon system as is diamond of elemental carbon. Any notion which might suggest that hydrocarbon molecules spontaneously evolve in the regimes of temperature and pressure characterized by the near-surface of the Earth, which are the regimes of methane creation and hydrocarbon destruction, does not even deserve consideration."

Lomonosov’s eighteenth-century hypothesis of a biogenic origin of petroleum has been replaced during the past forty years by the modern theory of abyssal, abiotic petroleum origins, an extensive and formidable body of scientific knowledge which has been developed in the former U.S.S.R., particularly in the countries Russia and Ukraine. The modern Russian-Ukrainian theory of petroleum has established that petroleum is a primordial material of deep origin which has been erupted into the crust of the Earth.

The errors involved in predictions about the future availability of petroleum, inevitably occasioned by an inappropriate application of the rococo hypothesis that petroleum somehow miraculously evolved from limited volumes of biogenic matter, obtain generally from the very notion of such as a "limited, fossil" material. Correctly, one should better recognize that there exists no more reason to expect a future shortage of petroleum than of, say, mid-oceanic ridge basalt (MORB). [MORB is the rock characteristic of the loci of the deep suture, spreading zones on the mid-ocean floor where new oceanic crust is constantly being erupted from the mantle of the Earth.] Those predictive errors obtain specifically from neglect of several extremely large potential sources of petroleum, of which a few are set forth here.

(1) The potential to produce petroleum from the crystalline basement, from volcanic structures, from impact structures, and from non-sedimentary regions generally has been entirely neglected.

(2) The petroleum potential of the riftogenic suture zones, both subsea and on-shore, have been largely neglected.

(3) The petroleum which certainly exists and will surely be produced from reservoirs underneath those presently being produced has been almost entirely neglected^‡.

(4) The potential to produce petroleum gas from reservoirs beneath the methane clathrate zones has been completely neglected, as has mostly the same of the methane clathrate reserves themselves.

(5) The potential that certain of the petroleum fields presently producing may be drawing pressured hydrocarbons from an open and active fault or conduit from the mantle, and therefore, may never be depleted, has been entirely neglected, as has the potential to develop non-depleting fields by deep drilling.(Mahfoud and Beck 1995)

Measurement of elevated abundances of helium: The petroleum from all producing reservoirs manifest elevated abundance of helium. The natural gas and oil from, for example, the Yulyovskoye field contains not less than 180,000,000 m³ of helium. Helium is of deep origin and can be transported significant distances in the Earth's crust only by entrainment in another carrier fluid, typically hydrocarbons or hydrocarbons and carbon dioxide or nitrogen together, by which process it becomes concentrated in the carrier fluid.⁽⁷⁾

Simplified Plan of Ultra Deep Oil ⁽⁸⁾

What we are really observing are naturally occurring ultra-deep oil wells, leaking vast quantities of oil from the mantle of the earth upwards through fractures into what we nowadays refer to as "sedimentary oil fields", located relatively close to the surface. As the production companies draw oil out of these known reservoirs through oil wells, field pressure is slightly reduced, thereby allowing more ultra-deep oil to migrate up from the mantle and restock the reservoir from below.

Russian studies of their own ultra-deep wells and those in the White Tiger field in Vietnam, indicate in very rough terms that migration from the mantle is probably 20-30% less than production at Middle East wellheads, meaning in turn that if the flow rates of existing Iraqi and Saudi wells are reduced by about 30%, oil supply and production can and will continue forever, constantly replenished by ultra-deep oil from the mantle itself.

When oil is extracted from a producing formation underground, it flows out through pores in the reservoir rock, and then into the open borehole, from where it is transported to surface by the production tubing string. So by the very nature of the beast, the bottom section of the well is "open hole" which allows the oil to flow out in the first place, but because it is comprised of exposed and sometimes unstable rock, this open hole section is also continually subject to all manner of turbulence and various contaminates. For example, tiny quantities of super fine silt may exit through the pores but not continue to the surface with the oil, tumbling around in the turbulence instead, until the silt very slowly starts to block off the oil-producing pore throats. Yes, of course there are a variety of liners that can be used to slow down the contamination, but there is no such thing as a Henry Ford oil filter 10,000 feet underground.

The inevitable result of this is that over time, the initial production rate of the well will slowly decline, a hard fact known to every exploration oilman in the business. However, this is certainly not an indication that the oil field itself is becoming depleted, proved thousands of times by offset wells drilled later into the same reservoir. Any new well comes on stream at the original production rate of its older cousins, because it has not yet had time to build up a thin layer of contaminates across the open hole. Though as we shall see it is possible to "do an oil change" on a producing well and bring it back to full production, this is extremely expensive, and rarely used in the west.

Look at a simple example:

Say we have a small oil field in Iraq with ten wells that each started out in life producing 10,000 barrels of oil per day. Fine, for a known investment we are producing 100,000 barrels of oil per day from our small field, at least for a while. Five years later contamination may have slowed our overall production down by ten percent to 90,000 barrels per day. So we are now faced with a choice:

·    either "do an oil change" on all ten existing wells at vast expense and down time

·    Or simply drill one additional well into the same reservoir, thereby restoring our daily production to 100,000 barrels with the minimum of fuss.

In ninety-nine percent of cases, onshore producers will simply drill the extra well.
Naturally there are times and places where this simple process is not an option, for example on a huge and very expensive offshore platform, which may have only 24 drilling 'slots', all of which have been used up. To restore the overall production after five years one can either build another giant platform next door for two billion dollars, or "do an oil change" on each of existing 24 wells, one at a time. Clearly this time one is forced to carry out the time consuming business of restoring the open hole section at the bottom of the well to its old pristine condition, before various contaminates started to slow down your production rate.

For this task first, the production tubing is pulled out of the hole, and then run back in with a drill string, to which is attached an under-reamer as shown in the pictures above. When the reamer is directly opposite the top of the open hole producing section, the drill string is rotated to the right and the blades fly out under centrifugal force to a distance preset before lowering the tool into the hole.

The objective is to cut away the contaminated face of the well to a depth you consider will once again expose pristine producing pores. As the spinning under-reamer is slowly lowered, it enlarges the size of the hole, with the contaminated debris cut away and flushed back to surface by the drilling fluid. Hey presto, you have a new oil well, and it only cost one or two million dollars to restore.

This process is rarely used in the west, which is true, but it is not true of Russia, where the objective for many years has been to dominate global oil supply by continual investment. The Russian oil industry managed to surge ahead, under-reaming thousands of its older existing onshore wells in less than ten years.

It is worth remembering the immense contribution of Russian geologist in initiating the exploration and production of petroleum in India. India has compelling economic and national security interests in proving or disproving the theory. If the theory is false then we are no worse off than today and if it is correct then we have the most to gain reordering the prevailing oil and gas reserves in the world

References:

1.      http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/bloggers/2482838/posts

2.      World Net Daily; Dec. 1, 2005

3.      The Deep Hot Biosphere by Thomas Gold, Ph.D. (2001)

4.      Is There Any Real Shortage of Oil? © O. R. Adams Jr. 2011

5.      Julie Creswell, Fortune magazine, 2-4-2003

6.      Considerations about recent predictions of impending shortages of petroleum evaluated from the perspective of modern petroleum science. J. F. Kenney Joint Institute of the Physics of the Earth, Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow; Gas Resources Corporation, Houston.

7.      Abiotic oil theory: The drilling & development of the oil & gas fields in the Dnieper-Donetsk basin, V.A. Krayushkin, T.I. Tchebanenko, V.P. Klochko, Ye.S. Dvoryanin, and J.F. Kenney

8.      http://www.vialls.com/wecontrolamerica/peakoil.html