Learning About Crude Oil

My education on the subject of crude oil continues, but not without difficulty. Academic writers, who are notorious for making papers hard to follow, have nothing on what writers in the oil industry routinely turn out.

Many years ago I recall my company getting a successful cost information program functional, only to discover that the last thing management wanted was to know what things were costing. Their thinking went something like this. If we have accurate reporting on this job, which is going to be quite profitable (and it was), there is no telling who will learn about it, to our detriment. Whatever you think of this management technique, that particular organization (it was a joint venture) succeeded in losing in a few years most of the profit it had made since it began.

Something similar goes on in the business of producing and marketing petroleum. Many people do not want the world to know the facts; there are too many secrets to be kept, axes to be ground, reputations to be maintained, and bureaucracies, government and corporate, to be pacified. Then there is the propensity of so many to actually look forward to the disaster they imagine will occur when the world "runs out of oil." And one must suspect that the oil companies believe convincing people we have a problem is a great way to persuade them to accept high gasoline prices.

One particular feeble discussion suggests that the deep drilling required to tap abiotic oil fields, as the Russians are doing, is too expensive. The only solution is for us to take whatever oil fields we feel the need for. Those making this argument appear to assume that making war, supporting fleets at sea and in the air and killing people is done at no cost. Their thinking must be that if we keep the populace in a state of nervousness over the possibility of running out, if we can forecast food shortages and starvation, we have a great opportunity to establish big governments with armies and lots of cushy government jobs, as we resolve the problems of the world, real or imagined, all caused by a lack of that oil. There is now ample evidence that oil exists or is being produced in the earth’s mantle to migrate up to the crust where we can get at it. There is ample evidence that crude oil does not originate from biologic life and is not a fossil fuel like coal. And there is ample evidence that there is lot of it.

The earth’s crust averages some 9 miles in thickness; under the oceans it is much thinner averaging about 3 miles. Where the upward movement is too slow to satisfy us, deep drilling is the answer and Russia has become one of the world’s top producers using this technology. In 1951 Russian scientists formalized the Russian Ukrainian deep abiotic theory of the origin of oil. It suggests that crude oil either consists of primordial compounds or evolves from primordial elements located below the crust of the earth. Having been debated fiercely for 20 years in peer-reviewed papers (all in Russian of course) by Russian scientists it is not longer a theory. Using it Russian drillers have located deep oil, developed deep wells and are marketing abiotic oil to the world today, from a seemingly limitless supply.

The refusal of the oil industry in the West to abandon their scientifically unproven theory of a biologic origin for oil for one that continues to find oil is a serious mistake. Let’s hope the industry wakes up.