denim

Link

If this is true, and I personally find it more believable than the previous theory, the only remaining problem with "fossil" fuels will be the CO and CO2 output!

denim

And there's also this link which calls our use of coal into question.

It's possibly time for serious changes in how we're using and considering energy use/production.

Skettios

I'm not sure if I see this as good news or bad news.

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denim

Would you mind expanding on that, please?

DelayedReaction

I honestly cannot fathom why society is so opposed to nuclear power. Nuclear plants have become extremely safe, and the amount of waste generated is miniscule compared to other forms of power generation. Yeah it's not solar or wind power, but both of those forms of energy are far less efficient on a cost/kW basis.

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Yakk

The thing with nuclear energy is the waste is concentrated.

With coal plants, the waste is unconcentrated and spewed out into the atmosphere over decades.

With nuclear plants, the waste can and is concentrated, and stored indefinately.

Really, I think we can simply take all the nuclear waste, mix it with 100,000 parts air and water, and spew it out into the atmosphere: there would be fewer deaths, less radioactive substances, and less environmental damage than the same amount of energy generated from coal...

(This assumes, of couse, we aren't an idiot and build a chernobyl. Chernobyl is the rough equivilent of a coal-fired plant so badly managed that it burns down an entire city, except on a larger scale.)

The concentration of nuclear power means that the danger isn't felt to be socialized. The danger is where the waste is, or where the plant is.

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denim

You're really missing the point. Which would you rather have, radioactives in one, easily located place, or all over the place, so that you can't avoid 'em?

apeman

ok, maybe there is plenty of methane underground but
problems - high temperature = condensation? not really. Maybe they mean high pressure, or low temperature?

condensation of heavier hydrocarbons? where from? we started with methane, where did they appear from?

you can presumably make long-chain hydrocarbons by polymerising (i.e. getting the molecules to link up) methane - that's more or less how most plastics are made. So I'm not discounting the theory, but their arguments in favour aren't worth much. From my limited knowledge of chemistry that is

in the 2nd quote, i think they keep saying nuclear when they mean radioactive. It's true radioactive substances are released when you burn coal, but nearly everything is radioactive to a certain extent.

so interesting articles but let down by their arguments a bit I think

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tangledweb

It is really hard to take the author seriously when he spouts a lot of information with no documentation or references. Sounds a lot like wishful thinking with some cause for hope.

apeman

yeah exactly, and surely hoping that more oil will turn up from somewhere isn't a good strategy. Why not start trying to make useful things from plant oil instead? that's probably going to be of more use, also should be fairly carbon-neutral

now i think about it, it is a little hard to accept that oil comes from squashed bugs... but if you've ever seen a fossil fern in a coal mine or been on a mountain top with sea creatures embedded in the rock it helps

nuclear power is a good idea as long as nothing goes wrong

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MSD

I'd like to see this hit mainstream news so that big-name researchers have no choice but to study what's shoved in their faces. Unfortunately, I think it will be debunked.

Pacifier

why do you want to exterminate mankind?

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denim

Peace in the middle east!

Delvid

It would be cool to find massive oil reserves. It would give us the opportunity to flip the bird to the mideast.

NoSoup

A little off topic, but -

As far as nuclear waste is concerned, (I know this might be a child-like theory) why don't we just slap it on a space garbage barge and launch it at the sun? If the "Barge" got anywhere near the sun, I would imagine that it would be incinerated with little to no ill effects, not that I have any real education in the specifics...

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Pacifier

too expensive, dig a hole and throw it in so that the next generation has to worry about it is much cheaper.

__________________
"It seems to me that the idea of a personal God is an anthropological concept which I cannot take seriously. I also cannot imagine some will or goal outside the human sphere. Science has been charged with undermining morality, but the charge is unjust. A man's ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties and needs; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death
— Albert Einstein

denim

Very expensive proposition. It takes millions, in the multiple 100s of them, just to get to orbit. And if there's an abort part way up, or before you get inside the Earth's orbit, where do you think the pieces are going to land?

animosity

this is kinda dumb but im going to say it anyway...
just dump all our waste on the moon... or at least take a load with us when we go for something else.

elfuq

Umm .. cost
Umm .. risk

Now once we've built the Space Elevator, that's a different matter.

ngdawg

Studies and experimental structures have been done using incineration of garbage, reburning fuel waste, solar energy and plant oils. The problems lie in costs of conversion to these methods and the narrow-mindedness of the public sector in embracing alternatives to fossil fuel. NIMBY has become a common acronym in the last few years. We may agree that these alternatives are needed, but, not in MY back yard!
On a silly side note- All this drilling for oil and digging for coal gives me odd visuals of the earth one day becoming one huge sinkhole....

fckm

This theory belongs to Thomas Gold:
http://astro.cornell.edu/people/facs...hp?pers_id=102
http://people.cornell.edu/pages/tg21/

This guy is apparently a genius.* He single handedly built Cornell University's astronomy department and was first to come up with theories pertaining to subsurface oceans on europa and the dried up riverbeds on mars.

Since carbon and hydrogen are light materials, they are among the most abundant materials in the universe. It makes sense that methane (pretty much the simplest combination of carbon and hydrogen) would exist plentifully in our solar system. And seeing as how methane is the lightest hydrocarbon, you should actually see more more methane as you move further away from the sun, so that the outer planets/asteroids should have plenty of the stuff.

As far as nuclear waste goes, we should do what everyone else does, reprocess it. This gives us more fuel (which admititly can be used for weapons) and reduces the waste volume by (i believe) several hundred times. The waste can then be basically turned into glass. As a ceramic, it's pretty much impossible for the waste to find it's way into the water supply (cermics don't solvate).

Personally, my thought is that once the waste is in this stable and greatly reduced form, it can potentially make sense to just shoot it into the sun. Although there really is a shitload of waste already, and it will probably be too much to launch economically (even in reprocessed form) given current launching technologies.

*As with most really smart people, he's also somewhat eccentric. He apparently doesn't believe in radiation pressure. That is, he doesn't think that solar sails work, or that radiation can impart momentum on objects.

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denim

Einstein is said to have not believed in quantum mechanics. I have to say I don't either. I mean, where would they get tools? They'd be tooooo smallll. I mean, you think you have trouble finding a good mechanic NOW, these would only be there some of the time when you looked for them.

"Schrodinger's quantum mechanic", anyone?

tecoyah

Here ya' go.....little something to chew on.

Geoscientists are cringing as news reports dredge up what they have long considered a preposterous assertion about the origin of oil: That none of the fossil fuels found on this planet come from fossils. The idea, heavily debated in Russia during the 1950s and 1960s, holds that the world's oil is not made of decomposed biological organisms; rather, it forms inorganically at near-mantle depths then migrates up to the crust.

The newest incarnation comes from J.F. Kenney, a self-proclaimed oil and gas driller from Houston, Texas, who worked with three Russian scientists, including Vladimir Kutcherov of the Russian State University of Oil and Gas. Their paper on inorganic hydrocarbon formation, published in the August 20, 2002, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), has generated coverage in Nature, The Economist, and New Scientist and led Kenney to an interview on National Public Radio (NPR). PNAS published the paper at the request of Academy member Howard Reiss, a chemical physicist at the University of California at Los Angeles. As per the PNAS guidelines for members communicating papers, Reiss obtained reviews of the paper from at least two referees from different institutions (not affiliated with the authors) and shepherded the report through revisions.

The paper examined thermodynamic arguments that say methane is the only organic hydrocarbon to exist within Earth's crust. The report also discussed the hypothesis that high pressures of 25 to 50 kilobar or more are needed for establishing natural petroleum hydrocarbon molecules. The authors also included a description of laboratory experiments in Moscow that created petroleum products from marble, water, and iron oxide under 50 kilobar of pressure and 1,500-degree Celsius temperatures.

But the news stories, Kenney says, are written on the premise that "I have 'developed a thermodynamic argument that demonstrates that the hydrocarbon molecules of natural petroleum cannot evolve spontaneously at the low pressures and temperatures of the near-surface crust of the Earth.' Such is absolute nonsense. Many geologists would agree. But, Kenney adds, "The fact that the hydrocarbon molecules which comprise natural petroleum cannot evolve spontaneously at the low pressures and temperatures of the near-surface crust of the Earth has been known by competent physicists, chemists, and chemical engineers for over a century. In my article, I only reviewed this knowledge briefly, using the efficient formalism of modern thermodynamics."

Kenney's slap in the face to the competence of modern geologists is nor winning him any converts. Even astrophysicist Thomas Gold of Cornell University, who wrote two books on the subject of inorganic oil on Earth, is surprised by the media's response. There is nothing new about any mix of hydrogen and carbon at pressures of 40 kilobar or so, and temperatures of greater than 800 degrees Celsius, forming oil."

Most commercial drilling occurs in sedimentary rock where source material temperatures range between 75 and 200 degrees Celsius. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Gold spearheaded a project, which he says also involved Kenney, to illustrate the prospects of abiogenic oil and gas by drilling into crystalline rock in Sweden. But the granite did not yield an economically viable result.

Still, Kenney appears undaunted. During the interview on NPR, he said he found, while working with Kutcherov over the last ten years, inorganic oil and gas fields in the northern flank of the Dnepro-Donetsk basin in the Ukraine that are greater than the entire reserves in Alaska.

Kenney and his Russian colleagues' paper in PNAS is "an excellent and rigorous treatment of the theoretical and experimental aspects for abiotic hydrocarbon formation deep in the Earth," says organic geochemist Scott Imbus of Chevron-Texaco Corp. "Unfortunately, it has little or nothing to do with the origins of commercial fossil fuel deposits."

While geologists agree that crude oil can come from inorganic means, the majority of commercially recovered petroleum, they say, is organic. And they are frustrated with advocates of this alternative theory who dismiss evidence of a biological origin or interpret organics in crude oil as contaminants. Such an idea is anathema to the well-established understanding that biomarkers in petroleum are a result of living organisms transforming the complex molecules, dying, and then being subjected to burial processes that turn the biomarkets into petroleum products.

The idea of finding an abundance of crude oil ready for the tap at depths currently unreachable is tantalizing. But, says geochemist Alexei Milkov of the Deep Ocean Exploration Institute at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and a graduate of Saint-Petersburg State University in Russia, "I've never met an industry geologist that uses abiogenic theory to find oil and gas fields, and that includes Russian industry geologists. These guys pay money for mistakes and can't afford using wrong theories to continue exploration." A key factor in deciding whether to put money in exploration of a frontier basin is the potential quality and extension of source rock, Milkov adds. "This strategy apparently works for them so far."

That's a pity, says Roger Sassen, deputy director of Resource Geosciences, a geochemical and environmental research group of Texas A&M University.

"The potential that inorganic hydrocarbons, especially methane and a few other gases, might exist at enormous depth in the crust is an idea that could use a little more discussion. However, nor from people who take theories to the point of absurdity," he says. "This is an idea that needs to be looked into at some point as we start running our of energy. But no one who is objective discusses the issue at this time."

Christina Reed is associate editor of Geotimes, a publication of the American Geological Institute, where this story originally appeared Published by permission.

COPYRIGHT 2003 Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal
COPYRIGHT 2003 Gale Group

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denim

I don't think anyone is suggesting that coal has a non-biological origin.