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2 Russia is far from oil's
peak By F William Engdahl
The good news is that panic scenarios
about the world running out of oil any time soon
are wrong. The bad news is that the price of oil
is going to continue to rise. "Peak Oil" is not
our problem. Politics is. Big Oil wants to sustain
high oil prices. US Vice President Dick Cheney and
friends are all too willing to assist.
On
a personal note, I've researched questions of
petroleum since the first oil shocks of the 1970s.
I was intrigued in 2003 with something called the
Peak Oil theory. It seemed to explain the
otherwise inexplicable decision
by Washington to risk all in a military move on
Iraq.
Peak Oil advocates, led by former BP
geologist Colin Campbell and Texas banker Matt
Simmons, argued that the world faced a new crisis,
an end to cheap oil, or Absolute Peak Oil, perhaps
by 2012, perhaps by 2007. Oil was supposedly on
its last drops. They pointed to soaring gasoline
and oil prices and to the declines in output of
the North Sea, Alaska and other fields as proof
they were right.
According to Campbell,
the fact that no new North Sea-size fields had
been discovered since the North Sea in the late
1960s was proof. He reportedly managed to convince
the International Energy Agency and the Swedish
government. That, however, does not prove him
correct.
Intellectual
fossils? The Peak Oil school rests its
theory on conventional Western geology textbooks,
most by American or British geologists, which
claim oil is a "fossil fuel", a biological residue
or detritus of either fossilized dinosaur remains
or perhaps algae, hence a product in finite
supply. Biological origin is central to Peak Oil
theory, used to explain why oil is only found in
certain parts of the world where it was
geologically trapped millions of years ago.
That would mean that dinosaur remains
became compressed and over tens of millions of
years fossilized and were trapped in underground
reservoirs perhaps 1,200-2,000 meters below the
surface of the Earth. In rare cases, so goes the
theory, huge amounts of biological matter should
have been trapped in rock formations in the
shallower ocean regions such as in the Gulf of
Mexico or North Sea or Gulf of Guinea. Geology
should be only about figuring out where these
pockets in the layers of the earth, called
reservoirs, lie within certain sedimentary basins.
An entirely alternative theory of oil
formation has existed since the early 1950s in
Russia, almost unknown to the West. It claims that
the conventional US biological-origins theory is
an unscientific absurdity that is unprovable. They
point to the fact that Western geologists have
repeatedly predicted finite oil over the past
century, only then to find more, lots more.
Not only has this alternative explanation
of the origins of oil and gas existed in theory,
the emergence of Russia as the world's largest oil
and natural-gas producer has been based on the
application of the theory in practice. This has
geopolitical consequences of staggering magnitude.
Necessity the mother of invention
In the 1950s, the Soviet Union faced "Iron
Curtain" isolation from the West. The Cold War was
in high gear. Russia had little oil to fuel its
economy. Finding sufficient oil indigenously was a
national-security priority of the highest order.
Scientists at the Institute of the Physics
of the Earth of the Russian Academy of Sciences
and the Institute of Geological Sciences of the
Ukraine Academy of Sciences began a fundamental
inquiry in the late 1940s: Where does oil come
from? In 1956, Professor Vladimir Porfir'yev
announced their conclusions: "Crude oil and
natural petroleum gas have no intrinsic connection
with biological matter originating near the
surface of the Earth. They are primordial
materials which have been erupted from great
depths."
The Soviet geologists had turned
Western orthodox geology on its head. They called
their theory of oil origin the "abiotic" theory -
non-biological - to distinguish it from the
Western biological theory of origins.
If
they were right, oil supply on Earth would be
limited only by the amount of organic hydrocarbon
constituents present deep in the Earth at the time
of the planet's formation. Availability of oil
would depend only on technology to drill
ultra-deep wells and explore into the Earth's
inner regions. They also realized that old fields
could be revived to continue producing, so-called
self-replenishing fields. They argued that oil is
formed deep in the Earth, formed in conditions of
very high temperature and very high pressure, like
that required for diamonds to form.
"Oil
is a primordial material of deep origin which is
transported at high pressure via 'cold' eruptive
processes into the crust of the Earth," Porfir'yev
stated. His team dismissed the idea that oil is is
biological residue of plant and animal fossil
remains as a hoax designed to perpetuate the myth
of limited supply.
Defying conventional
geology The radically different Russian
and Ukrainian scientific approach to the discovery
of oil allowed the USSR to develop huge gas and
oil discoveries in regions previously judged
unsuitable, according to Western geological
exploration theories, for the presence of oil. The
new petroleum theory was used in the early 1990s,
well after the dissolution of the USSR, to drill
for oil and gas in a region believed for more than
45 years to be geologically barren - the
Dnieper-Donets Basin in the region between Russia
and Ukraine.
Following their abiotic or
non-fossil theory of the deep origins of
petroleum, the Russian and Ukrainian petroleum
geophysicists and chemists began with a detailed
analysis of the tectonic history and geological
structure of the crystalline basement of the
Dnieper-Donets Basin. After a tectonic and deep
structural analysis of the area, they made
geophysical and geochemical investigations.
A total of 61 wells were drilled, of which
37 were commercially productive, an extremely
impressive exploration success rate of almost 60%.
The size of the field discovered compared to the
North Slope of Alaska. By contrast, US wildcat
drilling was considered to have a 10% success
rate. Nine of 10 wells are typically "dry holes".
That Russian geophysics experience in
finding oil and gas was tightly wrapped in the
usual Soviet veil of state security during the
Cold War era, and was largely unknown to Western
geophysicists, who continued to teach fossil
origins and, hence, the severe physical limits of
petroleum. But slowly it begin to dawn on some
strategists in and around the Pentagon well
after
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