Comments on: “Fossil” fuels?

By: Meryl Yourish

Meryl Yourish — Tue, 02 May 2006 16:04:03 +0000

I think the mistake is thinking that an encyclopedia written with no editors has any sort of potential at all.

The noise-to-signal ratio makes the overall project pretty worthless.

And I make that statement going by my decades of experience with internet users. Yes, you have the stalwart, steadfast, optimistic purveyors of truth who generally drive projects like these.

Then you have the rest of the world, who screw them up.

The thing about the internet: Anyone can say anything they like. You have to be a really discerning reader in order to drill down through the mounds of misinformation and get at the truth.

By: The Doctor

The Doctor — Tue, 02 May 2006 15:41:57 +0000

Wikipedia is also becoming notoriously politicized by people who post entries for purposes other than adding fact…a pity, since it has such great potential; entries really ought to be vetted…

By: Meryl Yourish

Meryl Yourish — Tue, 02 May 2006 14:15:50 +0000

Doc, I found it when I was researching fossil fuels. It’s in the Wikipedia entry, which is what I often use as a starting point. (Wikipedia is notoriously unreliable.)

By: Meryl Yourish

Meryl Yourish — Tue, 02 May 2006 14:14:10 +0000

Wolfwalker: thanks, it makes much more sense now. I don’t think I was thinking in terms of millions of years. More like in terms of last year’s mulch, probably.

By: The Doctor

The Doctor — Tue, 02 May 2006 12:51:27 +0000

I’ts also intriguing that for a theory that was “revived in the 50′s” someone relatively literate who reads the headlines in the science section never heard of this idea of abiogenic oil until last week from a caller on a talk-show using it as proof that environmentalists were dupes; then it’s mentioned here. Just seems to me that it sounds funny in the whole story…

By: The Doctor

The Doctor — Mon, 01 May 2006 13:53:35 +0000

Abiogenic oil is a cute idea, and mostly being pushed by oil company apologists who don’t want to waste money and time conserving and working on alternate fuels because “according to this theory it’s a renewable resource which will last forever.”
There may be a reason why this theory came up in the 19th century and has been superceded by newer and better science; because it’s wrong, maybe?

By: wolfwalker

wolfwalker — Sat, 29 Apr 2006 13:12:41 +0000

Oh, one other thought: Thomas Gold’s “deep hot biosphere” theory makes some solid predictions as to where oil deposits might be found. Those predictions can be compared to what the conventional theory says, and the differences can be tested. Several test wells have been drilled in places that Gold says there should be oil but conventional theory says there shouldn’t. So far, none of the test wells has found any oil. However, conventional theory continues to find new oilfields. Gold’s theory is interesting and fun to think about, and it would be very nice if he was right and oil supplies were effectively unlimited, but all the available evidence says he’s wrong. Not stupid, not evil, not a con artist or a snake-oil salesman. Not even a crackpot. Just wrong. Wrong from the very best of motives. But still wrong.

By: wolfwalker

wolfwalker — Sat, 29 Apr 2006 13:00:52 +0000

Meryl,

“But how? Iâ€™m trying to imagine the sheer tonnage of plant life that would have had to die and be converted to oil, and thatâ€™s where I have the problem.”

That’s reasonable. It does take a tremendous amount of plant matter to equate to all the known petroleum — not to mention all the known coal deposits, which are also from fossilized vegetation, and all the oil that’s been lost over time as it leaked from those underground reservoirs.

What makes it possible is time. Most people don’t understand the sheer scale of geologic time. I like to illustrate it this way: No human lives who witnessed the American Civil War 140 years ago. You would have to go back at least four generations from the oldest living man to find someone who lived through the Napoleonic Wars, 200 years ago. You’d have to go back another 40 generations to find anyone who saw a Roman army in battle. That Roman would have to go back twice as far from his time to find an ancestor who might have seen the Great Pyramid being built. And all of that is just the span of recorded human history — a mere five thousand years.

Well, geologic time is measured in millions of years, not just thousands. We think of the dinosaurs as one great group, Tyrannosaurus and Brachiosaurus and so on, all in one breath. Yet the reality is that T. rex lived closer to our time (65 million years ago) than it did to that of Apatosaurus (150 million years ago), and it’s as far back again to the time of the first dinosaurs (around 220 million years ago). And even before that, it’s another 300 million years to the Cambrian “explosion” of multicelled animal life.

That’s a LOT of time!

This webpage gives what look like ballpark numbers on how much plant material it takes to make a gallon of petroleum. The numbers look impossible, until you inject geologic time. Then they merely look mind-boggling. :-)

By: Li'l Mamzer

Li'l Mamzer — Fri, 28 Apr 2006 23:50:06 +0000

I’ve read about abiogenic petroleum, and there are some who mainain that the process is current and ongoing, meaning, the deep subterranean oil-producing chemistry is constantly producing new reserves.

May those new reserves reach the surface by way of non-Islamic, non-Jihadi territories. How about Israel, for a change?

By: Meryl Yourish

Meryl Yourish — Fri, 28 Apr 2006 20:18:57 +0000

But how? I’m trying to imagine the sheer tonnage of plant life that would have had to die and be converted to oil, and that’s where I have the problem.

Don’t get me wrong — I am in no way a scientist — but I like to be able to wrap my brain around something in a way that I can understand it. And boy, the PR guys need some work with this one. I swear, I thought that “fossil fuels” meant we were using oil from dead dinosaurs. And I am far from an unread, uneducated person.