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Re: Basic Choices and Constraints on Long-Term Energy Supplies



Richard Tarara wrote:
And then there is this--FWIW

Yes, FWIW ... which leaves us with the question: what is it worth???

Sustainable oil?
By Chris Bennett
....
The theory is simple: Crude oil forms as a natural inorganic process which
occurs between the mantle and the crust, somewhere between 5 and 20 miles
deep. The proposed mechanism is as follows:

* Methane (CH4) is a common molecule found in quantity throughout our
solar system - huge concentrations exist at great depth in the Earth.
* At the mantle-crust interface, roughly 20,000 feet beneath the
surface, rapidly rising streams of compressed methane-based gasses hit
pockets of high temperature causing the condensation of heavier
hydrocarbons. The product of this condensation is commonly known as crude
oil.

That's novel: how is it that _high_ temperature is "causing the
condensation of heavier hydrocarbons"??? But this is a minor
point, possibly reflecting an unskilled journalist rather than
a deep flaw in the theory. More serious points follow:

....
In his 1999 book, "The Deep Hot Biosphere," Dr. Gold

Tommy Gold died about a month ago:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A1122-2004Jun23.html
As is traditional for obituaries, that one is sympathetic to
its subject, but still it conveys the idea that many of Gold's
pronouncements were hypothetical and controversial. He had a
tendency to be a one-sided passionate advocate, rather than a
dispassionate seeker of the truth.

In a less-sypathetic vein, one can find allegations of plagiarism:
http://www.gasresources.net/Plagiarism(Overview).htm
and references therein, especially:
http://www.gasresources.net/VAKreplytBriggs.htm

Unless I see additional evidence, I am going to think of
this as a 50-year-old Soviet theory, not a 25-year-old
Tommy Gold theory.

>> presents compelling evidence

Much of the evidence is less than compelling. Much of it
is true but irrelevant to the alleged conclusion of
"sustainable oil".
a) The point is made that there is primordial carbon
in the universe. True, but so what? Please tell us
something we didn't already know. That point might be
relevant if we were required to refute the claim that
Pennsylvanian plants made carbon out of something else
such as SiO2, but nobody has ever made such a claim.
b) The point is made that methane is found in the atmosphere
of planets such as Jupiter. True, but again: so what?
That's evidence for primordial carbon [see item (a)]. It
is also consistent with the idea that volatile substances
such as methane naturally segregate to the outer layers,
which argues _against_ having disproportionate amounts of
deeply trapped methane. On earth (which unlike Jupiter
has lots of free oxygen and water) any non-deep methane
will be converted to CO2 and then mostly deposited as
carbonate ... rather quickly on any geological timescale.
So our atmosphere looks different from Jupiter's. Duh!
c) There are arguments about physical and/or biological
processes that make the upwelling hydrocarbons "appear"
to have a date consistent with paleozoic or mesozoic
deposition. I find these arguments baroque.

=========

We must keep in mind that there are several ideas on the
table:
1) Deeply trapped hydrocarbons.
2) Exploitable forms and quantities of such.
3) Sustainable oil supplies.
*) etc.

One or more of these ideas may be _partly_ right, even if
we haven't seen proper evidence. I don't know. (As a
general rule: if a fool tells you the sun rises in the
east, it might nevertheless be true.)

==================================

More generally, we should remain keenly aware of how easy it
is to cook up "alternative" theories that cannot easily be
refuted.

Given a little practice with out-of-the-box thinking, and
I suspect that most participants on this list could come
up with ten "alternative" theories before breakfast.

I personally have been asked to review maybe 100 manuscripts
of this sort. The first one or two were exciting. If you're
lucky you can find a way to refute the claim. I remember
one that alleged a new gravity-like interaction that
coupled not to the mass of the particle but to its _spin_.
It further alleged that since unpaired spins are rare in
nature, the coupling constant could be rather large yet
remain heretofore unobserved. Experiments were proposed.
My buddy Bernie took one look at it and said "ferromagnets".
If the manuscript were anywhere near correct, the unpaired
spins in each and every bar magnet would have long ago
caused collapse into a black hole. Ditto for demagnetization
cryostats.

An important idea to keep in mind when evaluating heretical
ideas: a hundred pieces of weak evidence is not as good as
one piece of strong evidence. Hint: probability depends
_exponentially_ on the _square_ of the error bars. (The
same rule might wisely be applied when evaluating hundreds
of weakly-if-at-all meaningful political ads.)

At the other extreme, sometimes when you read a wild proposal,
you can't refute it, and parts of it actually make sense, so
you read it again ... and by the fourth or fifth reading you
are totally convinced that the new way is right and the old
way is merely a pale shadow. Examples include:
-- Braginsky: quantum nondemolition measurement
-- Bennett et al.: reversible computation
-- Bennett et al.: quantum teleportation
-- Shor: quantum computation

Occasionally ideas that are 100% true take a long time to be
accepted, for example continental drift. But major examples of
this are rare. So it is more than a little odd that after the
deep-methane theory has been around for 50 years, and given the
tremennndous monetary incentives involved, there are no clear
examples of anybody exploiting such deposits.