What We Know Wednesday: Abiotic Oil, Myths and Facts.

After my post Peak Oil a friend of mine Grant Lawrence asked me to comment on Abiotic Oil, or Oil from non-organic origins.

In every field there are certain terms that raise Red Flags among people experienced in the field. In the oil industry the term “Abiotic Oil” is the biggest one. Whenever I would hear an Investor say they were planning on investing in Abiotic Oil Exploration I knew that someone was trying to rip them off and they would never see their money again.

However just because scam artists are drawn to a concept doesn’t mean it is necessarily wrong, in fact for a good scam to work there has to be a kernel of truth in it.

The idea for Abiotic Oil came from Russia in the 19th century when little was known about how oil was formed, and research was hampered by the fact that 600ft was about the maximum depth that could be drilled.

Since then it has been elaborated on to take in new findings, but here is the basic argument.

When the Earth first formed it had a Abiotic Methane atmosphere, as the crust cooled some of this methane worked its way in to the porous rocks, later these porous rocks were pushed down to the top of the mantle where they were trapped at a layer between the mantle and the crust (technically in the Lithosphere), where the temperature and pressure is just below the point where methane will break into Hydrogen and Carbon.

This part is semi-verifiable through a number of processes, although they can all be picked apart individually, so I’m going to go out on a limb and say Abiotic Natural Gas or Methane is real and present in the Lithosphere.

The next part is where it gets tricky. This Methane in the Lithosphere is just below the temperature where it breaks down into Hydrogen and Carbon, if the parts of the Lithosphere folds down the heat and pressure become to much and the Carbon turns to Diamonds, if it folds up the Methane is exposed to the bottom of the crust which is moving over it at a rate of 6 inches a year.

This allows the natural gas to bond with elements in the Earths crust forming more complex hydrocarbons. The rocks containing these more complex hydrocarbons either move up or down. If they move up the cooler temperatures make these hydrocarbons stable, if they move down they break down and the cycle starts all over again.

Once the hydrocarbons are in a stable area the pressure below them pushes them higher, as they get higher, the rocks get cooler allow even more complex hydrocarbons to form until they get within a mile of the surface where they can turn into oil.

The hypothesis is much more detailed but that is the general argument for Abiotic Oil.

Unfortunately, it is impossible to tell Abiotic Oil from biotic oil so without actually drilling down to the bottom of the crust it is still just a hypothesis (it’s not a Theory until we are able to drill that deep to test it.)

When I was in the oil business I had read a few articles that claimed to have found natural Abiotic Oil in trace amounts, looking back now I can’t seem to find those. However, I do remember that they said it was only trace amounts.

Even if Abiotic Oil is real the question remains does the Earth produce enough of it to be meaningful?

The two examples of large Abiotic Oil fields that I have reviewed from investors prospectuses were both run by the Soviet Union’s KGB. That is a good reason to be suspicious.

The first (and I don’t have those prospectuses on hand so this is from memory) was a test well that the Soviet Union claimed to drill 10 miles down and recover trace amounts of Abiotic Oil before the well collapsed in on itself.

Since in the 20 years since the Soviet Union collapsed the deepest well drilled is roughly 7 miles deep and the KGB destroyed the site and the records I tend to discount this evidence.

The second example I came across that was being pitched to investors was Vietnam’s White Tiger Field. During the mid 70s there was a boycott on Soviet Oil, but not on Vietnam’s oil. The KGB ran a test program to recover Abiotic Oil in the White Tiger Field. The oil was processed by the KGB and Vietnam sold it. (After oil is processed it is impossible to determine the source.)

After the fall of the Soviet Union the KGB destroyed their oil wells in the field and their processing equipment. The White Tiger Field continues to produce oil but it has been shown to be formed from biotic processes.

The timing of the Soviet Experiments and lack of repeatability makes me doubt that they really discovered abiotic oil.

As far as Abiotic Oil being the savior of the Peak Oil Crisis, my experience makes me really doubt it. The evidence is just not there that there are meaningful reserves of Abiotic Oil.

But there is a scientific phrase: Absence of Evidence is not Evidence of Absence. It could be there are large quantities of hydrocarbons between the 7-mile deep mark and the bottom of the crust (not crude oil the temperatures are too high) that could be used to fuel our economy.

If there is it will take tremendous resources to get them and those resources can be better spent on renewable energy resources that do less harm to the planet.

Way too Busy Wednesday

Every once in a while Real Life pulls me away from Blogging (Damn You Real Life). This has been one of those weeks.

I did want to do a sort of wrap up of the whole Swine Flu – Safety Science – Prevention topic that I got into on my Shut-Up Stupid Sunday post and Rocket Scientists elaboration in her Saturday Soapbox “Thankless Science”.

One thing that has not been pushed enough in the latest Swine Flu scare and most of the other communicable disease scares that I can remember is the Prevention Hero that almost everyone has sitting in their homes right now: Bleach.

Instead of buying all those expensive anti-microbial products being advertised, a gallon of bleach will work as good (if not better). I recommend the cheapest generic brand, they are all the same formula and if you’re worried about only having designer labels on your cleaning supplies, you’ve got issues I can’t deal with.

Naturally its not as flashy as other products but spraying down any surfaces with a 5% solution of bleach and water will kill almost all microbes that are on the surface and as an added benefit it will make any mold go dormant.

Another huge advantage bleach has is it breaks down very quickly when exposed to air, soil, sewage or just about anything else in the environment so its impact on the environment outside your home is minimal.

So just like the CDC and local Health Departments who get little or no thanks for immunizing the at risk population against the flu (Once again the vaccine is as safe as the regular flu shot), the cleaning people and our hero bleach get no thanks for keeping us safe from a huge number of diseases.

Note: I also wanted to clarify something I mentioned in my post on Swine Flu, I mentioned that young adults are more at risk from the Swine Flu because of how good a job that the CDC has done in suppressing previous outbreaks. I didn’t point out that by suppressing those outbreaks they saved millions of lives compared to the few thousands of people that who will get the disease because they weren’t exposed to flues in the past.

What we know Wednesday: Peak Oil

Not So Distant Future?

As a former oil industry executive, I’ll let you in on a little secret of what we talked about around the $1,000 water cooler. Peak Oil, and Strippers.

For those of you that don’t know what Peak Oil is I’ll offer a quick explanation, if you don’t know what a Stripper is I suggest you get out more.

All the major oil fields in the world were discovered before 1960, only small fields have been discovered since. For the last 50 years we have been relentlessly drilling new wells into these fields.

The oil from a well doesn’t last forever, the wells I drilled had a life span of 5 years of strong oil production, then a drizzle for the next 5 years. A well out in Texas can last a few decades before going into decline.

Naturally on these fields the wells concentrate around the biggest producers in areas that have the greatest chance of successfully hitting oil. The older the field the farther away from the big producers we are forced to drill.

In a new field, drillers can tap into the same vein as a big producer and get large amounts of oil making the fields total output increase quickly. This increase drops as the optimum spots to drill are quickly filled up.

In the Nash Oil Field where I drilled we would get excited about getting the chance to drill several miles away from a big producer.

Drilling father away from the main source of oil lowers the chances of success. In the 90s companies that drilled in the field I was working were hitting oil with 1 well for every 3 they drilled. By the time I entered the industry in the ’04 the odds were down to 1 in 5.

So as a field ages, its larger wells go into decline and you need to drill more holes to hit oil. After a while new wells aren’t being hit fast enough to overtake the decline in the old wells and the whole field goes into decline.

With no new major oil fields being discovered since the 60s as one field goes into decline it put more pressure on the fields that aren’t in decline, making them go into decline faster. Eventually, you can’t drill fast enough to offset the declining wells.

In the United States, The entire domestic oil industry reached its peak in 1970. We were producing 11 million barrels of oil a day; this has since declined to 5 million.

With the United States no longer increasing its production of oil, pressure was put on the rest of the world to develop their oil fields. Norway increased drilling in the North Sea, Russia became a major player in the energy market and Saudi Arabia went from being able to keep its national treasury in a shoebox, to being the land of oil billionaires.

But no new oil fields have been developed they are just exploiting their existing fields faster, and just like the Nash Oil field, these fields will eventually go into decline.

Kuwait has announced that its fields are all in decline, Several reports I’ve seen out of Iraq suggest that Saddam overworked his oil fields in order to achieve the 3 million barrels a day prior to Operation Iraqi Liberation (OIL) and there are serious doubts as to if it is technically possible for Saudi Arabia to increase its oil production beyond its current levels.

In 2008 when demand for overtook the amount oil that the world could produce sending oil and gas prices soaring, the Republican response was summed up as, “Drill, Baby, Drill”. Unfortunately merely building more oil drilling rigs and drilling more would do little to produce more oil.

In the case of the Nash Oil field where we were getting a hit rate of 1 out of 5, if you doubled the amount of oil rigs drilling there you would quickly run out of spots you can hit 1 out of every 5 wells you drill, and they would have to move on to places where 1 out of 8 was a good bet, then 1 out of 10, 1 out of 20. And every new well would produce smaller amounts.

While this drilling was going on, the drilling itself would push up the demand for oil as it takes a lot of energy to drill a well. In the declining fields you would quickly hit a point where the oil it took to drill 20 or so wells would be more than the one small well could produce.

As soon as it takes more energy to produce oil than the oil gives out there is no point in drilling.

In other words the World’s oil supply may have peaked at 81 million barrels a day that was produced in June of 2008, and we could be looking at having the supply of oil start to dwindle.

The Great Recession of 2008-2009, Great Depression 2.0, or whatever you care to call it dropped consumer demand for oil by 8% the greatest amount ever recorded. In order for the global economic engine to recover the US needs to continue to increase its demand for energy by 1.5% annually while oil production declines by 0.5% every year.

If no drastic action is taken this means we can continue at current rate of recovery with 10 to 20% unemployment, tent cities popping up in all major cities, and all the things you hear about on the news, for only 4 more years before we hit the point where demand overtakes supply again, and things will get really bad.

Now that I’ve bummed you out enough I’ll point to the good news that I started in my post Temper-Tantrum Tuesday: Energy Conservation and Solar Energy and wrap up both posts in my Fantastic Future Friday: Alternative Energy.

What we know Wednesday: The Heisenberg Abortion

With my Shut-up Sunday rant on abstinence-only education I thought I’d follow it up with a debunking of a bumper sticker slogan that right wingers love to use: “Life begins at conception”.

This is a platform that should be debunked in high school health class.

Conception is when the sperm fertilizes the egg forming a zygote, this zygote travels down the fallopian tube for four days. It does not attach itself to the uterus and is completely independent of the mother. In a natural conception (people having sex) the zygote cannot be observed, zygotes can only be seen under a microscope outside of the body.

In rare cases the egg will spontaneously begin dividing leading to asexual zygote formation. In the few cases where these have gone all the way to birth the offspring was a female genetically identical to the mother, no baby Jesus that way.

Pregnancy doesn’t begin until the zygote attaches itself to the uterus and becomes an embryo. At that time the woman’s body begins to undergo changes that can be observed.

In a healthy female in her 20s the zygote attaches itself to uterus roughly 65% of the time. The other 35% of the time it is passed out of her body in the menstrual cycle. As the woman gets older the uterus becomes less receptive to the zygote and the chances of it attaching become smaller.

In other words if you believe that life begins at conception and you are trying to get pregnant and both the man and woman have no fertility problems, if you don’t succeed in a month you should gather up your rags and have a funeral. Chances are a zygote lies dead on one of them.

The fact that the zygote needs to attach itself to the uterus for pregnancy is the principle behind the “morning after drug”. It conditions the uterus to be in an unreceptive state, blocking the zygote from attaching.

Although the “Life begins at Conception” is a catchy bumper sticker phrase, it means that life would start at an unobservable, and therefore indeterminate, time. As all women over childbearing age may or may not have a zygote floating around. Therefore, all women would be responsible for caring for a life that may or may not exist.

As the same people who scream that phrase want a stricter legal responsibility placed on women to care for the embryo than the child after it is born, transferring that to a zygote means all women would have to take extreme measures to protect a zygote that may or may not exist.

In other words all women of childbearing age would need to stay home and care for something that may or may not exist.

What we know Wednesday: Intelligent Design

In some places in this country wackos are pushing that science be replaced with Intelligent Design. So I thought it would be a good (and quick) topic for “What we know Wednesday”:

What Intelligent Design is:

Intelligent design is the assertion that "certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process such as natural selection.”

In English Classes we have name for this type of reasoning: Argument from Ignorance. An Argument from Ignorance is saying something can’t be so because the person making the argument can’t see how that something happened.

In my (hopefully) funny post: Squirrels have a Liberal Bias I made fun of the Intelligent Design supporters main argument, “What good is half a wing?” by pointing out flying squirrels have evolved to take advantage of half a wing and have used it to secure a niche in their environment.

The half a wing argument is a classic Argument from Ignorance, the author of the argument couldn't see the use for half a wing, but that doesn't mean a species (like the flying squirrel) hasn't found a use for half a wing.

As I was writing it I thought I was using another logical fallacy of the Straw Man Argument, setting up an easy to knock down argument. So I looked at the Intelligent Design arguments planning on finding a more solid line of reasoning but I could not find one.

One of the other arguments they have is “Evolution is just a Theory, not a fact.”

This wording is wrong, “Evolution is a Theory, not just a fact.”

A Theory (in science) is taking facts, like “if you drop an object on Earth it will fall at 32 feet per second squared” and “the greater the mass, the more gravitational force objects will have towards each other”, adding those up to come up with a hypotheses that describes what is happening in such a way results can be predicted consistently.

The fact of gravity makes it so if you drop a rock you know it will fall to the ground. The Theory of Gravity makes it so you can calculate how to get three men in a capsule to the Moon and back.

What the “Evolution is just a Theory, not a fact.” argument is, is merely taking words out of context to get a silly meaning. This is like saying, “No cat has eight tales, every cat has one more tail than no cat, therefore every cat has nine tails.”

Another argument they make is genetic information can’t be added to the genetic code. This is just wrong.

Genetic information is added to DNA all the time, they are called mutations.

When an organism sexually reproduces it gets half its genetic information from the mommy and half from the daddy. If either the mommy or daddy has come in contact with radiation, chemicals, or a million other things that can cause a break in their DNA molecule, the DNA will randomly try to repair itself, this will lead to a mutation. Species are constantly getting little mutations all the time.

Some is bad for the species and those born with a bad mutation, like a bad heart, die off sooner than the others and don’t bred as much leading to that mutation not being passed on and being pushed out of the gene pool.

The vast majority of mutations are neither good nor bad, these mutations sit dormant waiting for conditions to change until a time that they give the organism an advantage or disadvantage in their environment or simply become “junk DNA”.

Finally, there is that rare mutation that gives the organism an advantage in their environment like the fifth finger on a hand slowly moving over to become an opposable thumb. Or more elementary single cell organisms that stick together to become multi-celled organisms.

The entire Intelligent Design Assertion can be boiled down to these three lines:

An Argument from Ignorance.

Taking words out of context.

And, finally just plain wrong “facts”.

If anyone has any other assertions that Intelligent Design supporters are pushing, I’ll gladly show you where it fits into one of these categories (or sometimes two or even all three).

What we know (and don’t know) Wednesday

I started the Temper-Tantrum Tuesday series because I know a lot of my viewers stop by to keep up to date with the Catspiracy. For those of you that do that I want to say, “Thank You” and stop by tomorrow for the Purrsday edition of the Catspiracy. I figured if I kept my rants confined to one specific day those people would know that if it’s Tuesday it would probably be a rant and would be forewarned.

I really only did it for myself so I could get things off my chest and not chase off my followers. So when I got a positive feedback I was pleasantly surprised. So I figured I could set aside Wednesday to follow up on my Tuesday rant with a closer look at the science and skeptism behind one of the topics I ranted about Tuesday.

Global Warming

That Global Warming is real and provable is very easy. Our Moon doesn’t have an Atmosphere and its average temperature is –67 degrees F, Earth has an Atmosphere and its average temperature is 57 degrees F. Our Atmosphere keeps our planet 124 degrees warmer, a good thing too I don’t have that many sweaters.

As the Sun’s rays hit the ground they warm it up. On the Moon this heat is radiated back into space. On Earth this heat has to warm the lower atmosphere and it travels upward into the upper atmosphere where it is radiated out into space. This process is called Global Warming.

Global temperatures are regulated by two things, how much heat the planet receives from the Sun and how much heat the upper atmosphere radiates back into space.

Most people accept this part of Global Warming.

With that part of Global Warming agreed upon the next question is: Is this changing?

In the last century the average ground temperature has risen by 1.33 degrees F. So yes it is changing.

This change means that either the Sun is heating the planet more, or the atmosphere is radiating less heat back out into space.

Since the 1700’s the Sun has been getting brighter as part of its regular cycle. This means the heat that the Earth receives from the Sun has been increasing, however the temperature variation on Earth has been negligible for the first 200 years of that cycle. Even the most biased (but peer reviewed study) claims that the Sun can’t be responsible for more than 50% of the increase in the last century. Most scientists put that number at about 7%.

The other part of the equation is how much heat is being radiated back into space from the upper atmosphere?

The way to measure that is to look at the temperature of the upper atmosphere, the Stratosphere and the Thermosphere.

The Stratosphere has been cooling off in the last century by about 0.5 degrees C per decade. The temperature in the Thermosphere is best measured indirectly by looking at the overall atmospheric density (cooler air is more dense than warm air). The atmosphere has gotten 2% denser but the Thermosphere has gotten thinner. This means that the upper atmosphere is cooling, radiating less heat into space.

If the 1.33 degree F temperature rise over the last century was caused by the Sun these parts of the atmosphere would be heating up, not cooling down.

To determine what is causing less heat to escape scientists have looked at the reflective properties of different gases in our atmosphere. Some like sulfur dioxide reduce the amount of visible light hitting the ground while letting heat radiate through unhindered. Others like Carbon Dioxide and Methane let light through but don’t let the heat radiate back out. Oxygen and Nitrogen are fairly neutral.

Industrial activity has increased the amount of Carbon Dioxide on the planet. The strong correlation between the increasing temperatures in the lower atmosphere and increasing levels of Carbon Dioxide make it the prime gas to look at.

No, Not that Climate Model

Climate models (mathematical calculations based on the scientific properties of the atmosphere, not scantily dressed females pointing at clouds) show that increasing the amount of Carbon Dioxide in the atmosphere will in fact increase temperatures.

Knowing that is there room for serious debate? Absolutely.

Climate experts in the 1960’s believed that the increasing amount of Carbon Dioxide in our atmosphere would cause a 2-6 degree F increase in ground temperatures over in the 21st century. The current models show a 3-5 degree rise is probable. Most likely there will be a 4-degree rise in temperature over the next century if nothing is done.

Where the there is a huge disagreement is with the Global Warming doomsayers that point out different feedback mechanisms in the atmosphere and claim the 4 degree rise will trigger scenarios that will cause a sudden jump of 18 degrees.

I’ve looked over these claims and the problem I have with them is the statistics used. They are using low probability events to trigger the next low probability event. So while I will admit that our changing the Earth’s climate on such a massive scale is bound to have some things happen that is hard to predict, the piling of low probability events on top of each other is scientifically dishonest.

A 4-degree temperature rise is bad, but will not wipe humans off the planet. Solutions to global warming have to be looked at in that light so we can work on permanent long-term change over the next century to reduce our harm to the planet. Not look at an improbable 18 degree rise and go into panic mode.

I would love some serious comments on this subject, especially from the extremes (Global Warming deniers or Global Warming doomsayers).