Petroleum - the archetypal fossil fuel - couldn't have formed from the remains of dead animals and plants, claim US and Russian researchers. They argue that petroleum originated from minerals at extreme temperatures and pressures.

Other geochemists say that the work resurrects a scientific debate that is almost a fossil itself, and criticize the team's conclusions.

The team, led by J.F. Kenney of the Gas Resources Corporation in Houston, Texas, mimicked conditions more than 100 kilometres below the earth's surface by heating marble, iron oxide and water to around 1500° C and 50,000 times atmospheric pressure.

They produced traces of methane, the main constituent of natural gas, and octane, the hydrocarbon molecule that makes petrol. A mathematical model of the process suggests that, apart from methane, none of the ingredients of petroleum could form at depths less than 100 kilometres.

The geochemist community, and the petroleum industry, were both suitably outraged by the publication of the study. The usual parade of experts was trotted out, of course, but a funny thing happened: as much as they obviously wanted to, those experts were unable to deny the validity of the research. So they resorted to a very unusual tactic: they reluctantly acknowledged that oil can indeed be created from minerals, but they insisted that that inconvenient fact really has nothing to do with the oil that we use.

Showing that oil can also form without a biological origin does not disprove [the 'fossil fuel'] hypothesis. "It doesn't discredit anything," said a geochemist who asked not to be named.

... "No one disputes that hydrocarbons can form this way," says Mark McCaffrey, a geochemist with Oil Tracers LLC, a petroleum-prospecting consultancy in Dallas, Texas. A tiny percentage of natural oil deposits are known to be non-biological, but this doesn't mean that petrol isn't a fossil fuel, he says.

"I don't know anyone in the petroleum community who really takes this prospect seriously," says Walter Michaelis, a geochemist at the University of Hamburg in Germany.

So I guess the geochemist community is a petulant lot. They did "concede," however, that oil "that forms inorganically at the high temperatures and massive pressures close to the Earth's mantle layer could be forced upwards towards the surface by water, which is denser than oil. It can then be trapped by sedimentary rocks that are impermeable to oil."

What they were acknowledging, lest anyone misunderstand, is that the oil that we pump out of reservoirs near the surface of the earth, and the oil that is spontaneously and continuously generated deep within the earth, could very well be the same oil. But even so, they insist, that is certainly no reason to abandon, or even question, our perfectly ridiculous 'fossil fuel' theory.

Coverage by New Scientist of the 'controversial' journal publication largely mirrored the coverage by Nature (Jeff Hecht "You Can Squeeze Oil Out of a Stone," New Scientist, August 17, 2002).

Oil doesn't come from dead plants and animals, but from plain old rock, a controversial new study claims.

The heat and pressure a hundred kilometres underground produces hydrocarbons from inorganic carbon and water, says J.F. Kenney, who runs the Gas Resources Corporation, an oil exploration firm in Houston. He and three Russian colleagues believe all our oil is made this way, and untapped supplies are there for the taking.
Petroleum geologists already accept that some oil forms like this. "Nobody ever argued that there are no inorganic sources," says Mike Lewan of the US Geological Survey. But they take strong issue with Kenney's claim that petroleum can't form from organic matter in shallow rocks.

Geotimes chimed in as well, quoting Scott Imbus, an organic geochemist for Chevron Texaco Corp., who explained that the Kenney research is "an excellent and rigorous treatment of the theoretical and experimental aspects for abiotic hydrocarbon formation deep in the Earth. Unfortunately, it has little or nothing to do with the origins of commercial fossil fuel deposits."

What we have here, quite clearly, is a situation wherein the West's leading geochemists (read: shills for the petroleum industry) cannot impugn the validity of Kenney's unassailable mathematical model, and so they have, remarkably enough, adopted the unusual strategy of claiming that there is actually more than one way to produce oil. It can be created under extremely high temperatures and pressures, or it can be created under relatively low temperatures and pressures. It can be created organically, or it can be created inorganically. It can be created deep within the Earth, or it can be created near the surface of the Earth. You can make it with some rocks. Or you can make it in a box. You can make it here or there. You can make it anywhere.

While obviously an absurdly desperate attempt to salvage the 'fossil fuel' theory, the arguments being offered by the geochemist community actually serve to further undermine the notion that oil is an irreplaceable 'fossil fuel.' For if we are now to believe that petroleum can be created under a wide range of conditions (a temperature range, for example, of 75° C to 1500° C), does that not cast serious doubt on the claim that conditions favored the creation of oil just "one time in the earth's 4.5 billion year history"?

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