Questioning the Peak Oil Dogma

We are being told once again to expect ever-higher fuel and energy prices in the coming years, with a consequent drag on economies. Underlying these gloomy predictions is an underlying belief that humans are running short on sources of energy -- the peak oil dogma -- and will have to pay more as shortages worsen. But is the peak oil dogma based upon superstition, or fact?

Myth of Scarcity
Unless humans look for energy, they are unlikely to find it. But if they are willing to use their brains and their eyes, they can detect ever more geologic locations where a wide variety of hydrocarbon fuels were formed.

It is said that the cheap and easy oil is all gone, and that the low hanging fruit has been picked. But the "cheap and easy oil" was not that cheap and easy when it was first tapped. Technology had to be developed for each type of deposit to be exploited. This will continue to be the case.

This is an IEA estimate of hydrocarbon resource. It is very likely to be a vast unerestimate, as is typically the case.

Here is another scholarly estimate of world hydrocarbon resources, also likely to have significantly underestimated the true resource.

Here is another estimate, which clearly fails to account for the economic impact of cheap and abundant nuclear process heat from high temperature gas-cooled reactors, in the processing of gas to liquids, coal to liquids, kerogens to liquids, etc.

This graphic includes an estimate of comparison between relative carbon resources of gas hydrates and all other hydrocarbons.

This graphic compares relative gas hydrate resources in various locations.

This graphic looks at recoverable fossil fuel resources by nation. It underestimates a number of probable resources across the board, including shale oil & gas and several others.

When humans are confronted with resource shortages, they take a number of parallel approaches to relieving the resource scarcity.

But when shortages are caused by political or ideological perversity, there may be much less that humans can do, until the political or ideological constrictions are removed. That appears to be the situation associated with the multiple political dogmas of peak oil, carbon hysteria, overpopulation, and various other faux environmental political dogmas.

In the modern world, Russia, China, India, and a number of third world and emerging states stand out as distinct outliers from the global faux environmental rush to energy suicide. It is unlikely that Europe, Oceania, and North America will be willing to take the final faux environmental step of cutting their own throats (figuratively speaking), when such a large part of the world stands ready to loot their corpses in a very un-PC, un-green manner.

A Dynamic View of Continental Movements, and the Birth and Death of Oceans and Seas

500 Million Years of Continental Rearrangement
Oil and gas are generally formed under seabeds, when organic matter is covered with sediment, deprived of oxygen, and exposed to heat and pressure over long time periods. The video above presents one scientific theory of how continents move about, forming new seas and destroying others.

Confined seas that are fed a rich diet of sediments and nutrients are the best oil formers -- in other words, those that are fed by large, seasonably variable rivers. Of course, rivers will necessarily be birthed, change their courses, and die over geologic timespans -- just like seas.

That is why mental prospectors of ancient oil-forming seabeds must visualise the movement of the continents, the mountains, the rivers, the seas, over time.

Supercontinent Formation

In a paper published Feb. 9 in the journal Nature, Yale researchers introduce a process called orthoversion, in which each succeeding supercontinent forms 90 degrees from the geographic center of its ancient predecessor. Under the theory, the present-day Arctic Ocean and Caribbean Sea will vanish as North and South America fuse during a mutual northward migration that leads to a collision with Europe and Asia.

“After those water bodies close, we’re on our way to the next supercontinent,” said Ross N. Mitchell, the Yale doctoral student who is the paper’s first author. “You’d have the Americas meeting Eurasia practically at the North Pole.” _Physorg

Oil & gas are renewable resources -- but on a long timescale. Humans have barely begun to discover all the hydrocarbon resources which they will ultimately be able to economically exploit.

Plan ahead so as to ride out the waves and chop that are certain to come along the way.

Oil of Ancient and Future Seas: Mental Prospecting of Rich, Forgotten Oil Deposits

River Basins
Most crude oil comes from ancient marine organisms which bloomed, died, sank, and were covered by sediment to transform under conditions of heat and pressure into petroleum. The organisms required sunshine, CO2, and nutrients -- plus sedimentary cover. These conditions were best met in tropical and semi-tropical seas which received nutrient-rich outflows from either rivers or rich sea currents and upwellings.

But rivers supply both nutrients and sediment, so it makes sense to look to areas which were offshore from ancient river deltas. Above, you can see the main rivers of the modern world.

Pangaea
But the continents of the Earth were not always in their current relationship to each other. 250 mya the continents were situated close together in a formation now referred to as Pangaea. The geology of the landmasses of that time were somewhat different, meaning that different rivers flowed into different seas.

500 mya the continents were in a somewhat different configuration, providing optimal oil-forming conditions over a different area of the world's crust. And so on, back through the eons...

This movement of the continents in relation to each other is caused by plate tectonics, a dynamic phenomenon which is largely controlled by actions at the bottom of the seas.

The graphic above is meant to illustrate possible sites for "abiotic oil" deposits, but if you look carefully at the oceans, you can find seafloor ridges which are ground zero for the motion of the continents. New seafloor -- as molten lava which cools and solidifies in contact with seawater -- is pushed upward from beneath the ocean crust, causing a spreading of the ocean crust outward. Eventually the ocean crust is pushed into contact with thicker continental crust, where it subducts -- dives downward into the mantle. This subduction is associated with volcano formation, and other geologic changes, such as slow movement of the continental plates.

ImageSource
This "dance of the continents" is likely to bring the land masses together again in the future, over and over again in different formations. This is important in relation to where very old oil deposits are likely to be found, and where large future deposits of oil are likely to be formed in their turn.

For example, why is oil often found in deserts and arctic wastes?

Oil and gas result mostly from the rapid burial of dead microorganisms in environments where oxygen is so scarce that they do not decompose. This lack of oxygen enables them to maintain their hydrogen-carbon bonds, a necessary ingredient for the production of oil and gas. Newly developing ocean basins, formed by plate tectonics and continental rifting, provide just the right conditions for rapid burial in anoxic waters. Rivers rapidly fill these basins with sediments carrying abundant organic remains. Because the basins have constricted water circulation, they also have lower oxygen levels than the open ocean. For instance, the Gulf of California, an ocean basin in development, is making new oil and gas in real time today. The Gulf of Mexico is also a great example of new oil and gas formation in a restricted circulation environment (see image at right above).

The same plate tectonics that provides the locations and conditions for anoxic burial is also responsible for the geologic paths that these sedimentary basins subsequently take. Continental drift, subduction and collision with other continents provide the movement from swamps, river deltas and mild climates--where most organics are deposited--to the poles and deserts, where they have ended up today by coincidence. In fact, the Libyan Sahara Desert contains unmistakable glacial scars and Antarctica has extensive coal deposits--and very likely abundant oil and gas--that establish that their plates were once at the other ends of the earth (see image at right). _SciAm

Similar detective work may lead prospectors to rich petroleum deposits lying between Norway, Iceland, and Greenland. By the same logic applied to more recent timelines, oil and gas in the South China Sea is likely to be discovered.

As the SciAm article above explains, when a river flows into a limited basin -- such as the Gulf of Mexico -- oil and gas formation are most likely to occur due to rapid sedimentation. But thanks to plate tectonics and shifting continents and river-beds, many areas where rivers once flowed into limited basins have become something completely different, today.

It is no challenge to find oil where crude is already seeping to the surface. That was the case in the early days of oil discovery in the US, the Persian Gulf, and Central Asia. But to find the oil of ancient seas -- that is a challenge. Particularly since that is where most of the world's oil awaits.

Previously published on Al Fin, the Next Level