To Dispense With Abiotic Oil
it's fun to think about, but unlikely
Dear reader, my intention with this substack is to produce in public a coherent book on petrohistory, but what you’re getting here is far from the fully realized work. To support this project, buy a paid subscription now, and I’ll send you a “free” copy of the book in a few years, when it’s ready. It will be better than the below.
This is a real Substack post, not a full essay up to my own standards. That is to say, it’s a digression & a distraction. I just needed to handle this issue in my mind, and anyway, it’ll be quite a while before I post again. I’m working on nitrogen and a bit blocked on methane.
Luke Marshall recently did a good episode on Abiotic Oil at his Things Observed podcast (Spotify); you should listen to it when you have time. Abiotic oil theory holds that rather than being of organic origin (“fossil fuels”) oil is created by geologic processes deep in the mantle of the earth.I land on the side of biotic oil. Since mine is the “conventional” opinion, that might seem boring, but not if you’re Cyclonopedia-pilled. This post will be unconvincing as proof against abiotic oil if you’re a true believer. Abiotic oil theory cannot be definitively disproven, as unlikely as it is. Nobody is crazy for believing in abiotic oil; as an unrepentant tankie, I too want to believe.
Almost all the energy available to animals on the surface of this planet is solar energy converted via photosynthesis. The other potential ultimate energy source is the heat at the core of the earth, generated by the force of gravity of all the Earth above it plus the push and pull of the Sun and the Moon. If you subscribe to abiotic oil theory, that latter energy is foundational to your worldview, and that worldview is compelling. The rest of us are left with solar energy, with geothermal energy playing a small and boring part.
It is chemically possible for complex hydrocarbons to be formed from precursor chemicals present in the earth’s mantle at high heat and pressure (Kenney 1996). Therefore, there could be small amounts of abiotic oil seeping into the reservoirs tapped by industrial capitalism. The problem is that those precursor chemicals include methane, which is in short supply in the earth’s mantle because, like the atmosphere, the mantle is an oxidizing environment in which methane rapidly breaks down into smaller molecules. To the limited extent that methane molecules exist in the mantle, they could be forming themselves into simple hydrocarbons (alkanes) that make the long journey upwards to leak into existing oil reservoirs.
But it is unconvincing to argue that those alkanes would autonomously and en masse arrange themselves into the more complex organic molecules found in crude oil—alkenes like ethylene and aromatics like naphthalene, to take two examples at random out of the thousands of such chemicals that are present in ample quantities in crude oil. It could happen once and a while and by coincidence, but for huge quantities of these chemicals to be produced, you need life: a chemical actancy to be found in cyanobacteria and its ancestors. The fact that these chemicals are to be found in such ample quantities along the distillation tube—witness the proliferation of plastic, for these are the very same chemicals under discussion—makes it clear that the great mass of the world’s oil reservoirs is of biotic origin.
Geoffrey Glasby offers a history of abiotic oil that you should look at.1 The theory arises from to an effort initiated in 1947 that is always in every account called “Stalin’s Manhattan Project.” Stalin, keenly aware of the importance of oil during war, funded efforts to “determine the origins of petroleum and how petroleum reserves are generated in order to establish the most effective strategies for petroleum exploration.” That effort culminated in the All Union Petroleum Geology Congress in 1951, which enunciated the broad consensus behind abiotic oil. Mendeleyev (1877) assumed that “hydrocarbons were generated within the Earth by interaction of water with iron carbide.” Others proposed different mechanisms, but they all agreed that it seeped up from below. They believed themselves vindicated by the 1948 discovery of the Ghawar oil field in Saudi Arabia (the big one), which happened to lay in a basin caused by a rift between faults and so therefore could have seeped up rather than down. A similar tectonic rift forms the Dneiper-Donets oil fields–the basin that currently has War on its surface–where the wells that are said to be deeper than organic oil theory would allow for. But in many other places–a predominance–oil appears in places that abiotic oil would imply it couldn’t, including, at the time, the oil fields far from any faults in the Urals and Siberia. It is narratively gratifying to consider that today there may well be Russian petroleum geologists who see Dneiper-Donets as their doorway into an entire underground world of deep oil.
The evidence against abiotic oil is also physical. “Validation at the borehole.” Abiotic theory “was never the driving force in the discovery of the major oil fields of the Soviet Union.” Oil reserves are often found in basins of impermiable bedrock in the middle of a tectonic plate. That oil can only have settled down from the surface on its journey of decomposition. The oil was never where the abioticists claimed it was, as in the case of the long con of Thomas Gold’s expedition at Lake Siljan in Sweden, which lost $40 million collected from credulous investors. The Dneiper-Donets Basin, Ghawar, and every other oil reserve on the planet can be convincingly accounted for without straying out of the biotic realm. Oil doesn’t (only) bubble up between tectonic plates.
The real oil we separate and burn everyday is made up of decayed photosynthetic organisms like plant and algae; organisms among whom there may at any time be present in a gallon of crude representatives of that first wave of oxygenation, the very plants that first changed the composition of the atmosphere by generating large quantities of reactive, eager O2. Consider: You may at this moment be burning molecules from the very same cyanobacteria that participated in the revolutionary Great Oxygen Event. In the 10 million years–a geologic decade–that marks the transition from the Archaean to the Proterozoic Eon, cyanobacteria colonized the biosphere, pushing out many of the preexisting anaerobic organisms in the first Mass Extinction Event in earth’s history–these very precambrian cyanobacteria are in every gallon of oil. It was the first major hingepoint in the development of life on earth, from anaerobic to photosynthetic. Consider Parasurama, the sixth incarnation of Vishnu, who wiped the earth clean for a new type of life at the beginning of prehistory.
Any fact not otherwise attributed comes from this Glasby, 2006. I have no real training in chemistry; if I’ve gotten anything wrong, please comment or get in touch.