There is a fellow who was featured in the magazine Red
Herring (I think, or Wired) about two years ago or so
who has a theory regarding the source of oil, natural
gas, etc. His theory was not that it was biomass
generated, but that there was a process through which
this stuff was made deep in the crust,and then it
forces itself up through the crust by the same or a
related process.
I cannot remember many of the technical details, other
than it posited that the source of a lot of
hydrocarbons we were pumping up was not organic matter
from the surface. I am trying to do a google search
to see if I can find it with the bare scraps of
information that I can recall.
Here is one such guy (this may be the guy the Red
Herring article was about, I can't recall for
certain): Thomas Gold "The Deep Hot Biosphere"
Synopsis
Physicist Thomas Gold here explains the idea of a
deep, hot biosphere: the theory that there exists,
deep within the ground, a bacterial realm containing
greater mass than all surface life. This idea has
implications for the origins of life, the origins of
natural gas and petroleum, and the distribution of
life in the universe.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0387985468/026-6707989-2787637
Here is a link to one of Gold's papers:
http://www.people.cornell.edu/pages/tg21/origins.html
Here is an article describing some anecdotal data
http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2002/4/24/101927/375
I don't know how much any of this has made it into
peer reviewed literature.
Now, perhaps, someone who knows about the postulated
mechanisms involved can comment on this stuff.
Regards
--- Bill Payne <bpayne15@juno.com> wrote:
> Hi Glenn,
>
> My wife said she heard Rush Limbaugh say today that
> oil is oozing up out
> of the ocean floors at rates that exceed the largest
> tanker spill, old
> oil fields are re-filling, there is more oil left
> than we had ever
> imagined, and the environmentalist whackos are going
> to go nuts because
> of this bad (for them) news.
>
> Have you heard any of this, and what is the real
> story?
>
> Bill
>
>
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