how exactly do "fossils" make "fuel" - jerome corsi ph.d

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How exactly do 'fossils'make 'fuel'?

Posted: November 17, 2005

1:00 am Eastern

By Jerome R. Corsi 2008 WorldNetDaily.com

Editor's note: Craig Smith and Jerome Corsi will be on Gordon Liddys

show today at 11:00 a.m., EST.

Let's examine closely the alleged chemical processes by which decaying

plants and dinosaurs are supposed to decay into "fossil fuel."

Richard Heinberg, one of the core faculty of New College of California

(Santa Rosa) the "peak-production" adherent who is author of

"Powerdown: Options and Actions for a Post-Carbon World" tells us that

"the assertion that all oil is abiotic requires extraordinary support,

because it must overcome abundant evidence" that ties "specific oil

accumulations to specific biological origins through a chain of

well-understood processes that have been demonstrated, in principle,under laboratory conditions." So, if what Heinberg asserts is true, we

should have no problem discovering the precise laboratory-proven

formula under which ancient plant and animal life decay into

hydrocarbon fuel.

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Seppo Korpela, of the Ohio State University Department of Mechanical

Engineering, gives us a precise description of the chemical process

involved. He argues that fossil fuels form when "the early sedimentary

layers" at the bottom of a basin are deprived of oxygen such that the

organic matter in them did not decay, "as it does in the common setting

of kitchen compost." Then, "anaerobic bacteria" can "go to work andturn the organic material into the substance kerogen. Kerogen can be

thought of as immature oil." The term "anaerobic" refers to a process

occurring in the absence of oxygen. When kerogen is found at depths of

between 6,000 and 13,000 feet, and when the temperature and pressure

are "right," the kerogen "in the source rock will be cracked into oil. This

zone is called the oil window. At depths greater than 13,000 ft.

temperatures are so high that oil is cracked into gas."

Kerogen, it turns out, is not a chemist's term. Kerogen is a loose,

geological term (deriving from the ancient Greek word keros, meaning

wax) that an industry oil glossary defines as follows:

Kerogen. The naturally occurring, solid, insoluble organic

material that occurs in source rocks and can yield oil upon

heating.

Webster's Dictionary defines kerogen in a somewhat circular fashion:

"bituminous material occurring in shale and yielding oil when heated."

Yet, Webster's defines bitumen as "any of various mixtures of

hydrocarbons (as tar) often together with their nonmetallic derivatives

that occur naturally or are obtained as residues after heat-refining

naturally occurring substances (as petroleum)." Kerogen is not a term

typically found in chemistry textbooks or specifically used by

professional chemists. Use of the term kerogen is generally a signal that

you are dealing with a petroleum geologist or engineer, not a chemical

scientist.

Ker Than, a staff writer for LiveScience.com, provides the common

sense explanation for how kerogen is supposed to transform into "fossil

fuel."

In the leading theory, dead organic material accumulateson the bottom of oceans, riverbeds or swamps, mixing with

mud and sand. Over time, more sediment piles on top and

the resulting heat and pressure transforms the organic layer

into a dark and waxy substance known as kerogen.

Left alone, the kerogen molecules eventually crack,

breaking into shorter and lighter molecules composed

almost solely of carbon andhydrogen atoms. Depending onhow liquid or gaseous this mixture is, it will turn into either

petroleum or natural gas.

Chemical textbooks typically do not provide chemical formulae for

kerogen. What we do find in chemical textbooks are many descriptions

of how hydrocarbons form when carbon and hydrogen atoms bond toeach other by the covalent bonds. So methane is CH4, the first member

of what becomes an alkane series, such that members having two-,

three-, and four-carbon atoms are ethane, propane and butane,

respectively. We have yet to find a chemistry textbook that refers to

"kerogen" or describes any combination of ancient algae, tiny Mesozoic

sea animals, or dinosaurs as necessary or sufficient ingredients in theformation of common saturated hydrocarbons such as methane, ethane,

propane or butane. Methane is also commonly found on planets such as

Saturn (and its moon Titan) where science has never recorded the

presence of living plants or animals.

Sometimes chemistry textbooks revert to the common wisdom and

provide a loose verbal description of "natural gas" as having been

formed by "the anaerobic decay of plants and animals" (as we notedbefore, "anaerobic" refers to a process occurring in the absence of

oxygen). The textbooks, however, fail to reference any laboratory

experiment where this process has been demonstrated.

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matter of faith, rather than an observed process that can be described in

a precise chemical formula such that we can replicate in a laboratory the

process by which the compound is produced. This is a common

complaint of scientists who propose the abiotic, deep-earth theory of the

origin of oil. Astronomer Thomas Gold, stated the point succinctly on

page 85 of his 1998 book, "The Deep Hot Biosphere: The Myth of Fossil

Fuels." "Nobody has yet synthesized crude oil or coal in the lab from a

beaker of algae or ferns."

Published scientific analyses attempting to describe "the notion of

kinetic cracking of kerogen into petroleum" tend to start with thefundamental definitional problem. Consider this example:

It is important to keep in mind that the name kerogen, in

opposition with usual chemical nomenclature, does not

represent a substance with a given chemical composition.

Indeed kerogen is a generic name, in the same sense as

lipids or proteins.

The resulting theoretical discussions, while generally elaborate, typically

remain unspecified in rigorous chemical formulae that identify chemical

transformation processes. These technical discussions of how kerogen

produces oil from source rock generally end up describing field-oven

heating devices typically designed to analyze rock samples, such as the

Rock-Eval prolysis device, into which geologists can cook "source rock"

in the field to see if the specimen rock looks like other "source rock"

where oil has already been found. Again, the result is practical field

geology, not rigorous laboratory science specifying chemical formulae

identifying how flora and protoplasm turn into hydrocarbons.

In sharp contrast, methane has been synthetically produced in a rigorous

laboratory setting with a full specification of the chemical formulae

involved in the combination of iron oxide, calcium carbonate, and water

to produce methane at pressure conditions of the Earth's upper mantle.The scientists conducting the experiment concluded:

The observation of methane formation at mantle pressures

is significant because it demonstrates the existence ofabiogenic pathways for the formation of hydrocarbons in

the Earth's interior and suggests that the hydrocarbon

budget of the bulk Earth may be larger than conventionally

assumed.

Scientists have also recently analyzed spectrographic data validating the

formation of methane on Mars by fluid-rock interaction in the crust, with

no evidence of biologic or organic processes involved.

Scientists proposing the abiotic theory of oil have argued that the

"Fossil-Fuel" theory fundamentally violates the second law of

thermodynamics, a principle which specifies that energy disperses when

permitted, such that the energy flow never reverses. For example,

consider that when you release the neck of a balloon the air escapes; theair never naturally rushes to concentrate into a balloon without being

forced to do so. Thomas Gold stated the principle on page 46 of his 1998

book:

It would be surprising indeed if the Earth had obtained its

hydrocarbons only from a source that biology had taken

from another carbon-bearing gas carbon dioxide which

would have been collected from the atmosphere by

photo-synthesizing organisms for manufacture into

carbohydrates and then somehow reworked by geology into

hydrocarbons.

In other words, the "fossil fuel" from ancient flora or protoplasm would

demand that somehow the air went back into the balloon, a reverseflow-of-energy direction contrary to the second law of thermodynamics.

In other words, dead dinosaurs and ancient forests follow naturally the

law of entropy, "dust into dust," not the re-energized "fossil fuel" notion

of "dust into oil." We still lack the laboratory demonstrations authors

such as Richard Heinberg claimed we would find. Has anyone ever


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taken a flask of downed flora or dead protoplasm and produced a

hydrocarbon fuel out of the mixture, or is this a process for alchemy?

Jerome R. Corsi is a staff reporter for WND. He received a Ph.D.

from Harvard University in political science in 1972 and has

written many books and articles, including his latest best-seller,"The Late Great USA." Corsi co-authored with John O'Neill the No.

1 New York Times best-seller, "Unfit for Command: Swift Boat

Veterans Speak Out Against John Kerry." Other books include

"Showdown with Nuclear Iran," "Black Gold Stranglehold: The

Myth of Scarcity and the Politics of Oil," which he co-authored with

WND columnist Craig. R. Smith, and "Atomic Iran."

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