It is mostly assumed that crude oil is a substance of "fossil origin" that developed in the geological past through the decomposition of biological material. But is that also true?

From Lars Schall (google-translated to English from German below)

According to the common notions of the origin of crude oil, the hydrocarbons were created by dead algae, plankton and other marine and lacustric photosynthesisers, which sank to the bottom of seas and lakes and were embedded in sedimentary sludge in an oxygen-free environment without being able to petrify. With the further deposition of sediments, the depth of the subsidence gradually increased, as did the temperature of the organic substances. Due to the increasing pressures and temperatures, the material was converted into kerogen over time. First heavy oil, then light oil, wet gas, light gas and, at the highest temperature, methane were split off from the kerogen. [i]

But there is also another school of thought on the origin of oil. For example, it includes the US geologist JF Kenney after studying the modern Russian-Ukrainian theory of deep, abiotic oil origins in Russia.

This theory, explains Kenney, “is based on an extensive body of scientific knowledge about the chemical formation of the hydrocarbon molecules that make up natural petroleum, the physical processes that cause their terrestrial concentration, the dynamic processes of movement of this material into geological deposits, and the location and the economic extraction of oil reserves. " [ii]

According to the theory of deep, abiotic petroleum origins, "petroleum is a primordial material that erupted from great depths into the earth's crust." To put it another way: "Petroleum is not a 'fossil fuel' and has no causal connection with dead dinosaurs (or other biological remains ) 'in the sediments' (or anywhere else). " [iii]

In Kenney's words, the modern Russian-Ukrainian petroleum theory is based “on a strictly scientific argument based on the laws of physics and chemistry and on extensive geological observations. It is firmly rooted in modern physics and chemistry, where it originated.

Most of the modern Russian theory of deep, abiotic petroleum origins evolved from the sciences of chemistry and thermodynamics. Accordingly, modern theory relies unswervingly on the central principle that the formation of hydrocarbons must obey the general laws of chemical thermodynamics - just like all matter. " [Iv]

With this, however, the petroleum science, which developed in Eastern Europe, stands "in stark contradiction" to the geological theories which were put forward in Great Britain and the USA. There it is postulated that crude oil has its origin in biological substances. The petroleum science competition from the east denies the connection to biological substances. The only hydrocarbon molecules that would be an exception are those found in methane and, to a lesser extent, in ethene. "Only methane is thermodynamically stable under the pressure and temperature conditions of the near-surface earth's crust and can consequently arise spontaneously there, as can be observed with swamp gas or digester gas," explains Kenney. "However, methane is practically the only hydrocarbon molecule[v]

The notion that oil was of biological origin did not begin in the West, but in Russia, where the polymath Mikhail W. Lomonosov “hypothesized that oil could have originated from biological residues.” Using “perfectly normal” The gift of observation and the limited analytical possibilities of his time ", Lomonosov came to the conclusion that" ... 'rock oil' [crude oil or petroleum] arose from the tiny bodies of dead marine animals and other animals that sank into the sediments and stretched over a very long period Period under the influence of heat and pressure transformed into 'rock oil'. ”Such a description, Kenney estimates, was“ typical of descriptive science ”,“ as it was practiced in the 18th century by Lomonossow and Carl von Linné ”.[we]

Objections to Lomonossov's hypothesis were raised “for the first time at the beginning of the 19th century by the famous German naturalist and geologist Alexander von Humboldt and the French chemist and thermodynamicist Louis Joseph Gay-Lussac”. "Together they formulated the thesis that oil was a primordial substance erupted from great depths and had no connection to biological matter near the earth's surface." [Vii] The biological hypothesis was brought about by the advances made in the field of chemistry, and " especially after the formulation of the second law of thermodynamics by Clausius in 1850 (...) inevitably under attack. " [viii]

This first happened thanks to the French chemist Marcellin Berthelot, who began a series of experiments with which he demonstrated "the extraction of petroleum by dissolving steel in strong acid". Through these experiments, now known as Kolbe reactions, “he created the group of n-alkanes and made it clear that these were generated without any involvement of 'biological' molecules or processes”. The experiments that Berthelot had started were "later expanded and refined by other researchers such as Biasson and Sokolow, who all observed similar phenomena and also concluded that petroleum has no connection to biological matter". The Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleev also rejected the hypothesis that petroleum is formed biologically. Instead, "Mendeleev committed himself to[ix]

Mendeleev was way ahead of his time: the concept of deep faults was largely unknown. "Today, however, an understanding of plate tectonics would be impossible without acknowledging deep faults." [X]

Modern Russian petroleum science was initiated by the Soviet leadership after they "became aware of the crucial importance of petroleum in modern warfare" during the course of World War II. At that time, according to the estimates of its skilled workers, the USSR had very limited oil reserves. The largest oil fields were near Baku in what is now Azerbaijan. Although the Soviet Union also occupied two northern provinces of Iran, they were driven out again by the British in 1946. "By 1947 at the latest, the Soviets realized that the Americans, British and French would not grant them access to oil production, neither in the Middle East, nor in the oil-rich regions of Africa, nor in Indonesia, Burma, Malaysia or anywhere in the Far East or in Latin America." This is how the need was recognized to find new oil reserves within the USSR. In order to discover and develop new finds, the leadership of the USSR launched “a kind of 'Manhattan project' which was given the highest priority. In it she bundled all activities for researching the development of crude oil, determining its origin, investigating the formation of crude oil reserves and determining the most effective strategies for crude oil production. "[xi]

Within a few years, modern Russian petroleum science developed from this. It was first formulated in 1951 at a petroleum geology congress by Nikolai A. Kudrjawzew. By examining the biological oil production hypothesis, he was able to expose "the flaws in the assertions that were popular at the time to support this hypothesis". Soon after, Kudrjawzew received support "from many other Russian and Ukrainian geologists, including PN Kropotkin, KA Shakhvarstova, GN Dolenko, VF Linetskii, VB Porfirjew and KA Anikiev". In the years between 1951 and 1965 "more and more geologists - above all Kudrjawzew and Porfirjew - published articles in which they showed the errors and inconsistencies of the old hypothesis of 'biogenic origin'".[xii]

When the Cold War was over in the 1990s, the oil experts were introduced to the results of the theory developed behind the Iron Curtain. Vladilen A. Krajuschkin, the then director of the oil exploration department at the Institute for Geological Sciences of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences and head of the exploration project in the Don- Dnieper basin of Ukraine. [xiii]The focus of Krajuschkin's lecture was “a successful project by his team, namely the search for oil and gas in the Dnieper-Donetsk basin, which is located in eastern Ukraine near the Russian border. As Krajuschkin reported, the basin had been geologically studied for 45 years and found to be unsuitable for oil production, as no 'petroleum mother rock' (in English called 'source rock') was found. According to the theory of western geology, these special geological formations are the only rock in which hydrocarbons are or can be formed, i.e. where oil must be found, hence the term "source". [xiv]

The guest from the east revealed to the assembled US scientists that his team had found hydrocarbons in a "deep crystalline basement". By “looking for oil in places where, according to the conventional theory, no oil could have been found”, namely in deep rock or granite rock, “economically usable oil and gas fields have been discovered in a row”. [xv] Krajuschkin stated that oil and gas are not of biological origin, and that it would have met his team's hypothesis to search for abiotic hydrocarbons in a “crystalline environment”. The analyzes carried out on the oil extracted in Ukraine would have confirmed the assumption that oil and gas were formed at great depths in the earth's interior. [xvi]Even more: the oil “from the deposits in the crystalline basement of the Dnieper-Donetsk basin” was bacteriologically examined for “biological marker” molecules, in particular for porphyrin molecules, “the presence of which has been falsely used as 'evidence' for the supposed indicated the biological origin of the oil, ”said Krajuschkin. The result: "No sample of the extracted oil contained such molecules, not even in the ppm range (parts per million)." [Xvii]

Krajuschkin's “unveiling lecture” did not find a great response. The theory of a deep, abiotic origin of oil is either largely hushed up in the West to this day or dismissed as “nonsense”. [xviii]

JF Kenney discovered this when, in August 2002, an in and of itself remarkable study appeared in the peer-reviewed scientific journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), published by the United States Academy of Sciences. The authors of the study - JF Kenney, VA Kutchenov, NA Bendeliani and VA Alekseev - submitted quite convincingly that oil does not arise from organic compounds under the pressure and temperature conditions near the earth's surface, but rather from inorganic compounds under extreme temperatures and pressures as they only exist near the Earth's core. The magazine Geotimes noted in their articleInorganic Origin of Oil - Much Ado About Nothing? in the November 2002 issue, states that PNAS “published the study at the request of Academician Howard Reiss, a physical chemist at the University of California at Los Angeles. According to the PNAS publication guidelines, Reiss organized a peer review of the contribution by at least two reviewers from other institutions (to which the authors have no connection) and accompanied the contribution through the various tests. ” [Xix] In this respect, it can actually be assumed that the contribution by Kenney and his co-authors is scientifically sound as it was properly peer-reviewed prior to publication in a scientific journal .

If you look at the reactions the study elicited, you will come across a single appropriate article in the British magazine The Economistappeared. It said: “Millions of years ago, microorganisms and plants died in the sea and sank to the sea floor. Over time, they were crushed by layers of sediment that settled on them and eventually turned into rock. This organic material, now trapped several hundred meters below the surface, began to change. With the exclusion of air and the influence of low heat and low pressure, crude oil and natural gas were produced from the trapped biological remains. They say. ”Because in the 1950s a group of scientists around Nikolai Kudryavtsev in Eastern Europe claimed that this theory about the origin of oil could be referred to“ the realm of fables ”. "They claimed that hydrocarbons, the most important molecular building blocks of petroleum, originate deep inside the earth from inorganic material. Few people outside the USSR paid any heed to this new theory. This included the American JF Kenney, who now works for the Russian Academy of Sciences and is also CEO of the Gas Resources Corporation in Houston (Texas). "[xx]

Kenney, it said, wanted to have proven in a recent PNAS edition, “why it is energetically impossible for alkanes, one of the essential hydrocarbon groups in crude oil, to arise from biological raw materials in the depths of the earth, in which deposits were normally found and exploited. He developed a mathematical model based on quantum mechanics, statistics and thermodynamics that can be used to predict the behavior of a hydrocarbon system. According to his calculations, the complex mixture of straight-chain and branched alkane molecules in crude oil could only have formed at extremely high temperatures and pressures that are much higher than in the earth's crust, i.e. the place where, according to orthodox theory, the hydrocarbons are formed.

To confirm this assumption, he showed that a mixture of different alkanes (methane, hexane, octane, etc.), similar to that in naturally occurring petroleum, is formed when a mixture of calcium carbonate, water and iron oxide is heated to 1,500 ° C and then one Exposing pressure of 50,000 atmospheres. This experiment reproduced the temperature and pressure conditions in the upper mantle (about 100 kilometers below the earth's surface) and suggested that oil could be produced there from entirely inorganic raw materials. " [Xxi]

Elsewhere, JF Kenney had noted earlier that predictions of the future availability of petroleum would suffer from the fact that they were generally based on the belief that petroleum is a "finite, fossil" material. One would be better advised to “recognize that a future oil shortage is also no more likely than, for example, a future shortage of ocean basalt (MORB). [MORB is the typical rock in the area of ​​the spreading zone on the mid-ocean ridge, where new oceanic crust is constantly being created by the penetration of basaltic melts from the earth's mantle.] The errors in these predictions are due in particular to the fact that there are various extremely large potential oil sources from some of which are mentioned below are ignored.

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