Confessions Of An 'Ex' Peak Oil believer...

[zengrifter]

...or, why the oil isn't really running out. zg

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Confessions Of An 'Ex' Peak Oil believer

By F. William Engdahl

William Engdahl is the author of A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and
the New World Order, Pluto Press Ltd. http://www.engdahl.oilgeopolitics.net

RENSE | 9-25-7

The good news is that panic scenarios about the world running out of oil anytime soon are wrong. The bad news is that the price of oil is going to continue to rise. Peak Oil is not our problem. Politics is. Big Oil wants to sustain high oil prices. Dick Cheney and friends are all too willing to assist.

On a personal note, I've researched questions of petroleum, since the first oil shocks of the 1970's. I was intrigued in 2003 with something called Peak Oil theory. It seemed to explain the otherwise inexplicable decision by Washington to risk all in a military move on Iraq.

Peak Oil advocates, led by former BP geologist Colin Campbell, and Texas banker Matt Simmons, argued that the world faced a new crisis, an end to cheap oil, or Absolute Peak Oil, perhaps by 2012, perhaps by 2007. Oil was supposedly on its last drops. They pointed to our soaring gasoline and oil prices, to the declines in output of North Sea and Alaska and other fields as proof they were right.

According to Campbell, the fact that no new North Sea-size fields had been discovered since the North Sea in the late 1960's was proof. He reportedly managed to convince the International Energy Agency and the Swedish government. That, however, does not prove him correct.

Intellectual fossils?

The Peak Oil school rests its theory on conventional Western geology textbooks, most by American or British geologists, which claim oil is a 'fossil fuel,' a biological residue or detritus of either fossilized dinosaur remains or perhaps algae, hence a product in finite supply. Biological origin is central to Peak Oil theory, used to explain why oil is only found in certain parts of the world where it was geologically trapped millions of years ago. That would mean that, say, dead dinosaur remains became compressed and over tens of millions of years fossilized and trapped in underground reservoirs perhaps 4-6,000 feet below the surface of the earth. In rare cases, so goes the theory, huge amounts of biological matter should have been trapped in rock formations in the shallower ocean offshore as in the Gulf of Mexico or North Sea or Gulf of Guinea. Geology should be only about figuring out where these pockets in the layers of the earth, called reservoirs, lie within certain sedimentary basins.

An entirely alternative theory of oil formation has existed since the early 1950's in Russia, almost unknown to the West. It claims conventional American biological origins theory is an unscientific absurdity that is un-provable. They point to the fact that western geologists have repeatedly predicted finite oil over the past century, only to then find more, lots more.

Not only has this alternative explanation of the origins of oil and gas existed in theory. The emergence of Russia and prior of the USSR as the world's largest oil producer and natural gas producer has been based on the application of the theory in practice. This has geopolitical consequences of staggering magnitude.

Necessity: the mother of invention

In the 1950's the Soviet Union faced 'Iron Curtain' isolation from the West. The Cold War was in high gear. Russia had little oil to fuel its economy. Finding sufficient oil indigenously was a national security priority of the highest order.

Scientists at the Institute of the Physics of the Earth of the Russian Academy of Sciences and the Institute of Geological Sciences of the Ukraine Academy of Sciences began a fundamental inquiry in the late 1940's: where does oil come from?

In 1956, Prof. Vladimir Porfir'yev announced their conclusions: '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.' The Soviet geologists had turned Western orthodox geology on its head. They called their theory of oil origin the 'a-biotic' theory-non-biological-to distinguish from the Western biological theory of origins.

If they were right, oil supply on earth would be limited only by the amount of organic hydrocarbon constituents present deep in the earth at the time of the earth's formation. Availability of oil would depend only on technology to drill ultra-deep wells and explore into the earth's inner regions. They also realized old fields could be revived to continue producing, so called self-replentishing fields. They argued that oil is formed deep in the earth, formed in conditions of very high temperature and very high pressure, like that required for diamonds to form. 'Oil is a primordial material of deep origin which is transported at high pressure via 'cold' eruptive processes into the crust of the earth,' Porfir'yev stated. His team dismissed the idea that oil is was biological residue of plant and animal fossil remains as a hoax designed to perpetuate the myth of limited supply.

...more - http://rense.com/general78/expeak.htm

[zengrifter]

This explodes everything you thought you knew about the origin of OIL and its supposed coming scarcity. zg

[zengrifter]

I thought this was a blockbuster. zg

[aslan]

Originally Posted by zengrifter

I thought this was a blockbuster. zg

It's very interesting to say the least. It seems to me that Western scientists actually believed and maybe still do the theory of "fossil" fuel. The more I know about "science" the more I distrust its opinions and theories. They keep splitting the diffenrence between what is known and unknown, but they'll never come to the end.