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Wednesday, 01 June 2005 00:00 |
Originally published in GreenSWord June 2005
If you start to look in to the Peak Oil debate sooner or later you will come across some sceptic talking about how Peak Oil is all a mad chimera and there is something called abiotic oil which means we don’t have to worry. Abiotic oil means oil that is not formed from biological material over millions of years, but is supposed to be spontaneously created from carbon and hydrogen deep inside the earth.
Beware!
Three points to be aware of:
1. There is no concrete evidence for the existence of non-biological oil in a form which we could exploit. The two most commonly cited stories centre around Russian deep drilling finding oil at greater depths than normal, and a particular field in the Mexican Gulf which appears to be re-filling. Both of these can be explained by conventional geology and do not prove the existence of non-biological (abiotic) oil.
2. Even if oil can be formed by a non-biological process it is certain that this cannot be extracted with our existing or envisioned future technology. It would have to be brought up through a region where the pressure & temperature would cause it to break down, and where our drilling technology and borehole liners will not work
( there is some weak evidence that some hydrocarbons – particularly methane – can be produced in the type of conditions found deep in the earth’s mantle)
3. Even if abiotic oil existed, and could be extracted, it is still oil and burning it still generates greenhouse gases and pollution.
In practice there is no way that abiotic oil exists in any form that can be economically exploited. If we had the technology to drill that deep inside the earth then we would do far better by extracting geothermal energy…now there is a story whose time may yet come. Remember the ‘Hot Rocks’ project ? |
