TOPIC # FIVE

GEOLOGY – ABIOTIC OIL

by John D.R. Smillie, Science Reporter

Encore News Service

SUMMARY:

Is there such a thing as “Peak Oil”? It has been a subject of contention ever since I can remember, and I am four score and two years of age. Every time it is in the news, hysteria runs rampant and the price of gasoline goes up. So, are we actually running out of oil? Or is it a ploy to keep the price up?

Where does oil come from, anyway? Dinosaurs? Mammoths? Dead sea life? Composted garbage? Municipal sewage treatment plants? Old Septic tanks? Farm animal raw sewage? It is possible to say a qualified “yes” to every one of those questions. But that misses the point of the question “where does oil REALLY come from?” The question refers to a real commercial oil supply, not some impractical curiosity sources. The question also infers to “have we been correct in the answer that we usually give to that question?”

We always assumed correctness until recently. Everybody knew that our energy fuel was basically rendered fat from ancient dead animals that collected in underground pools. Oil companies even had pictures of dinosaurs plastered all over their service stations. Some still do.

Then some opposition to the old assumptions began to appear. Dr Gold and his ideas were first. Then word of the experiments by the Russians followed.

I say that oil has quiet a different origin than from being from fossil sources. I say that oil is a product of geologic manipulations, especially Continental Drift. The Drift or motion of a continent such as the North American Plate that moves westerly up against the Rocky Mountains. These mountains have formed because the Plate that the mountains are made up of are crashing into their neighbor mountains to their west. They in turn have crumpled from colliding into their neighbors. This situation is common all the way to the coast where subduction holds the Pacific Plate up against and pushed under the westerly moving North American Plate. Like colliding vehicles, the crashing Plates become wrecks that we call mountains. This process of mountain building is known to Earth Scientists as Orogeny. It is interesting that Orogeny often leaves large oil fields on its periphery, sometimes on the forward side of the Drift, but most often on the aft side where the pressure of the Plate under the flat Prairies is up against the mountains in Alberta. That deep pressure “cooks up” and squeezes the abiotic oil droplets into large pools of petroleum, in this case known as the LeDuc field. What is especially interesting about this example is that these oil wells are like artesian springs are to water. The oil sources are “living” deep underground also because the pressure is still there and is constantly squeezing more oil into the underground pools.

The really old oil pools that formed many millions of years ago, as those in Africa and the Middle East, are high quality like fine wines because they have been sitting there so long to have matured. The North Sea oil pools and the Labrador pools are ancient and from the same source as they originally formed at K/T when the dinos were whacked. Pangaea broke up leaving part of the pool in Europe while the rest of it became part of Maritime Canada.

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