This is part three of our lecture “The Scarcity Myth,” and the thesis of this lecture is very simple, that oil is not a fossil fuel and that therefore we are very unlikely to ever run out of it.  In the last two days, we did a lot of background work building up to today’s lecture which is actually the meet of the entire presentation.  We’re on agenda item 5, which is, “Is oil truly a fossil fuel?”

Let’s dig right in.   Since the 1860s, when oil was discovered, the belief has been that oil is a fossil fuel, which comes from decaying swamps, dead dinosaurs, and primordial growth that was compacted over millions of millions of years and turns into oil.  This is, of course, the fossil fuel oil theory.  I think many of you would be very surprised to know that there are other theories about where oil comes from, and interestingly enough, some of these other theories have evidence to support them, while in fact there is no evidence to support the fossil fuel theory.

The other major theory of the origin of oil is called the “abiotic oil theory,” abiotic meaning “not bio related”   The abiotic oil theory was proposed in the early 1930s and studied more than 1940s in Russia. Russia, at the time, was considered a very poor prospect for oil, because they had the wrong  type of rock.   My understanding is that there are three types of rock; sedimentary rock coming from sediments (in other words, the swamp and dinosaurs that are compressed over time), igneous rock which is rock that is from the inner core of the earth where it  is heated tremendously over time and cools when it reaches the surface, and metamorphic rock.

Anyway, Russia has very few areas of sedimentary rock, not many areas where the dinosaurs supposedly decayed.   In 1951, a Russian professor named Nikolai Kudryavstev proposed that oil is in fact abiotic and comes from material that the earth exudes on a continual basis.  In other words, the center of the earth is continually creating oil that bubbles to the surface and collects in the pools that we then drill into.  Of course, this theory was dramatically different from the fossil fuel theory and so it was dismissed by Western scientists, but in the Soviet Union, several thousand scientific journal articles have been published supporting this theory.  Chemists, physicists and geologists have found strong evidence that this abiotic oil theory is accurate, and now believe it or not Russia, is number two in the world in the production and extraction of oil.  They have achieved something that the United States has been unable to achieve, oil independence.

Proof of this is has been found in basins drilled in the Ukraine, where in the Dnieper – Donestak Basin, oil was found.  The area was declared empty in 1950, after extensive study found no potential at all of petroleum production, due to a lack of sedimentary rock.  Based on the beliefs of the Russian scientist, they drilled anyway and have since extracted 395 million barrels of super-deep oil.  Paleontologists have done an analysis of the oil and there are micro-fossil traces in the oil that date from an earlier geological era.  The oil that they have found here in the Ukraine is older than any of the dinosaur’s geologic time! How could that be possible?  The only way that it’s possible is that the oil came from some other source than from sedimentary decay.

Scientists are getting closer to proving the abiotic oil theory.   They have spent a lot of time studying the fossil fuel theory, which says that oil comes from the boggy primeval forest that rotted it was compressed into sedimentary rock.   Western scientific literature has never explained to the dinosaur to oil theory and there are so many questions that this theory raises. Did all of the dinosaurs die in one place?  Were there massive amounts of dinosaur death in Texas, Alaska, Saudi Arabia and the Middle East only?   What about Montana?  Montana is one of our richest sources for dinosaur remains but there’s no oil there.   How come the fossil fuel oil theory has never been proven, though it’s been studied extensively, while on the other hand, the abiotic theory has lots of evidence to support it?

One of the most interesting bits of evidence is from Sweden.   In 1990, the Swedish dug a super deep well in the Siljan region.  The hole was much deeper than normal oil wells to study this exact phenomenon.  The Siljan area contained absolutely no sedimentary rock, but at a depth of 4 miles, oil was discovered.  The important thing is that oil was below any possible source of biological material, which proves the abiotic theory.  Fossils are not needed for oil to be produced.  The Soviets were able to replicate this experiment in the Kola Peninsula, and achieved the same results after super deep drilling.  Oil was discovered below any possible source of biological material.

Please listen to the Podcast at this point to learn about several scientific studies prove the abiotic oil theory.

But before I close today, I want to ask my environmentalist friends a couple of questions.  I’ve gotten quite a few e-mails in the last day or two trying to argue with me over some of my ideas and some of the things that I presented about oil.  All of the people that are arguing with me seem to think that I’m crazy or doing something wrong for proposing that oil will in fact last forever.   And my question is, “Why aren’t you excited that we’re going to have oil forever?   What’s so bad about the idea that oil could last for millions of years?   Is it because you don’t want to validate because you’re against advancement? What’s the bad thing about oil being an infinite supply?”  You are acting like that is something that’s detrimental to the world, when in fact it seems to me that having energy for thousands of years will only help us alleviate poverty, will only help us produce food for people that are starving, will only let us help keep people warm during the winter so that they don’t freeze to death.   It seems to me that the only possible outcome of having lots of oil as our economies being strong.  That we can solve some of the world’s problems.  Is is bad?

The book at the upper right, Black Gold Stranglehold, is great on this topic.  Tomorrow, we’ll talk about renewable oil fields and some of the other exciting evidence that supports the abiotic oil theory.  Have a great day!

Thanks for the emails I have been getting, on both sides….

james.beach@att.net

 The Scarcity Myth (Part 3) - Oil Forever [13:56m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download