Post date: Feb 12, 2017 4:05:18 PM
I was processed through the British education system in the 70’s and true to Western culture, indoctrinated to believe oil was created 65 million years ago with a sudden collapse of biotic life to create the pockets of oil we now mine all around the globe.
The story goes like this –
Squishy fish, plankton and dinosaurs died in an area due to an apocalyptic event. Their bodies were immediately covered by silt preventing natural decomposition and with the action of successive layers of silt and tectonic movement the encapsulated corpses became subjected to increasing pressure and heat. In effect, pyrolysis where material is cooked in the absence of oxygen. The resulting gloop is the crude oil we now mine and refine to create oils and plastics.
The problem with this single (conveniently) explanation of oil creation is when I discovered that the Germans during World War 2 had already figured their mechanised war effort would grind to a halt if they couldn’t maintain their oil supply lines. They developed a method to artificially synthesise oil without the inconvenient 65 million year wait.
The Russians developed this line of science after the war and by the 60’s this was an established science fact within the Eastern ‘block’. Obviously still frowned upon in the Western ‘culture’ of oil exploration.
The rub for the Western explorers is the difficulty of finding the right sedimentary features to establish a drilling platform with the certainty of finding oil below. The Russians had concluded that oil is not a ‘biotic’ substance but is in fact an ‘abiotic’ substance that should be created deep in the crust of the earth and therefore could be found even under igneous rock.
It turns out the Russians were right and many of their platforms find oil at depths and below strata that Western science determines impossible. Now if this were true, that the earth naturally synthesises oil below the mantle, then the oil created there would work its way up through the crust and refill the wells currently being tapped. Once again it turns out the Russians are right. Wells considered to be spent have been revisited by western oil companies to find the production levels are back up at or near the original levels.
So here’s my problem. It’s not that I necessarily feel the need to believe one side or the other. I have no way to know definitively one way or the other in the absence of the means to do the independent research and drilling equipment to make my own conclusions. No. My problem is that an education system in the knowledge of a competing explanation for oil creation sold biotic oil as fact instead of theory.
What do I conclude from this ?
No one will be surprised that Oil is big business. Huge Business. The whole basis of what we do is predicated on oil and its products. The cost of oil changes daily on the trade markets on the basis of it’s scarcity. Our capitalistic culture values scarcity. What would happen if Huge Business admitted that the oil is never going to run out. That all they need to do is keep drawing off the existing wells at the rate they are being naturally replenished by the earth. Prices would crash. Oil production countries would lose their control. A different paradigm would be required, and that isn’t going to be allowed by Huge Business. Who by the way have now started to admit that small amounts of oil does seem to be naturally created by the earth but not in sufficient quantity to satisfy our use.
Oil is taught in school as science fact. In the west it’s ‘biotic’, in the east it’s ‘abiotic’. Two competing facts should tell anyone that science doesn’t know. Which relegates the subject to theory and raises it from science to Politics and Business. Huge Business.
The voice in the wilderness.
mark@sovereign-state-fidach.com