What’s Not Being Discussed About the BP Oil Spill

by pppspics

Abiotic Oil

The oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico has brought up a renewed interest in “abiotic oil” (or “abiogenic oil”).

Most of us learned in high school that oil is a “fossil fuel.”  It is the result of extremely long pressure and heat changing biological life into petroleum.  We think in terms of hundreds of millions of year, and consider our current oil to be ultimately derived from dinosaurs and such.  This theory has been associated with Georg Agricola who proposed it in the 16^th century.

Alexander von Humboldt, in 1804, was exploring Venezuela and wrote petroleum is the product of a distillation from great depth and issues from the primitive rocks beneath which the forces of all volcanic action lie. He considered the source of petroleum to be inorganic, not biological.

In 1951, Nikolai Kudryavtsev developed the modern theory of abiotic oil based on his studies of oil reserves in Alberta, Canada.  In a very simplified explanation, the early earth methane atmosphere became condensed and eventually led to oil pockets – based on carbon content long before any life formed on earth.  Some consider the high methane content in the Gulf oil to point to abiotic origins.

If BP Hit Abiotic Oil

Vladimir Kutcherov, Professor at the Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden and the Russian State University of Oil and Gas, is one of the leading specialists in the theory of abiogenic oil.  He recently said:

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.)

Peak Oil?

If Khutcherov is correct, this is bad news and good news.  The bad news is that this oil reserve may be extremely large, and will continue to leak for a very long time.  The good news is that if he is right, the concerns about “peak oil” are all wrong – there is plenty of oil to last for a very long time.