Jerome Corsi, last seen swift boating John Kerry, has co-authored a book promoting the theory of Abiotic Oil (i.e., that oil didn’t come from dinosaurs.) Could he have political motivations? (Please refer to the other posts on Corsi on this blog.)
Here are key quotes from some of his articles for WorldNetDaily. I will do research on each of these questions over the next few weeks, and will update this post with responses (marked with italics, starting with a capitalized word).
A key argument to “Black Gold Stranglehold: The Myth of Scarcity and the Politics of Oil,” is that energy resources are infinite, not finite. Craig Smith and I acknowledge that the argument is counter-intuitive. We are fighting the “Peak-Production” oil theorists who proclaim the common wisdom that we are running out of oil.
The White Tiger oilfield is at a depth of 5,000 meters (approximately 3 miles), of which 4,000 meters (about 2.5 miles) is fractured granite basement. How can the “Fossil-Fuel” theory possibly explain finding oil at these deep levels in granite rock?
REFUTATION - This seems to be readily explainable without using abiotic/abiogenic theories of oil. Link
Traditional petro-geologists would argue that these bedrock oil fields were small, relatively insignificant finds. They would certainly point out that the fields ultimately depleted. Such typically dismissive comments miss the main point of this column. If oil is “fossil fuel,” then why has so much oil for such a long period of time been found in bedrock structures? Moreover, why don’t these bedrock oil finds stimulate more extensive exploration in the deep-Earth structures below the bedrock where oil is found?
The answer to both questions is simple. When oil exploration data do not fit comfortably into accepted theory, petro-geologists minimize the results in order to stifle the investigation, preferring to avoid the disturbing possibility that the “Fossil-Fuel” theory itself might be nothing more than a convenient fiction.
REFUTATION - “so much” would seem to be overly optimistic. There seem to be no abiotic wells in commercial production. In any case, there is a reasonable answer here as to why deep hydrocarbons are such a tricky proposition .
REFUTATION -
petroleum geology is an empirical field which has evolved largely by trial and error. Petroleum geologists have learned the hard way where to drill (and where not to drill); in the process they have developed a theoretical model that WORKS. It is somewhat difficult to believe that generations of smart petroleum geologists missed huge amounts of oil. Gold tried to demonstrate just that, and all that he managed to do was to recover 80 barrels of oil in total, oil that was later shown to be most likely the result of contamination of the drilling mud. Nothing prevents others from trying again, but so far the results are not encouraging.
In “Black Gold Stranglehold” we argue that America’s growing dependence on foreign oil reduces our independence in foreign affairs. Rather than working to reverse Nigeria’s massive human problems, the United States is forced to work with a government that has little regard for the rights, economic well-being, or even the physical health of a great number of Nigerian people. Instead of opposing the political corruption, which has characterized Nigerian business and government for decades, America is turning a blind eye because we need the oil.
RESPONSE - Of course, no question. That Corsi is now adopting this position is somewhat hypocritical, however, given his gung-ho attitude to attacking Saudi Arabia, Syria, Iran and Iraq. The smart answer is not to spend hundreds of billions on fields which may provide the US with half a dozen years of oil, at best, but rather to spend those hundreds of billions in a concerted effort to improve nuclear reprocessing, clean up coal energy production, and to improve the yields from solar, wind, and various hydro-energy sources.
Even those who might stretch to argue that even if no dinosaurs ever died in sedimentary rock that today lies 30,000 feet below the surface, might still argue that those levels contain some type of biological debris that has transformed into natural gas. That argument, a stretch at 30,000 feet down, is almost impossible to make for basement structure bedrock. Japan’s Nagaoka and Niigata fields produce natural gas from bedrock that is volcanic in nature. What dinosaur debris could possibly be trapped in volcanic rock found at deep-earth levels?
Why did the AAPG decide to hold the Calgary session on abiotic oil? The answer is that the arguments and evidence for inorganic oil are gaining ground, despite the reluctance of conventional thinkers in the petroleum industry to entertain any idea that challenges so fundamentally their core beliefs.
A key may be found in the English version of Kitchka’s professional paper, which he e-mailed to us – so many oil finds have been made in bedrock structures that “Fossil-Fuel” theorists can no longer keep the lid on. The paper Kitchka e-mailed to us is an expanded version of his Calgary presentation.
What could be a more perfect answer for evolutionists? That’s always the solution offered by “Peak-Oil” believers – we have no choice but adapt … it’s either adapt or regress. If human beings learn to conserve, so the “Peak-Production” oil theorists argue, then we survive. If we don’t adapt, then we run out of affordable energy. Otherwise, as we come to the “end of oil,” we are bound to contract as a species, both in the quality of our material lifestyles and maybe even in the absolute numbers with which we populate the Earth…
This reversal is interesting in that evolutionists like to see themselves as the ones arguing the scientific theory. Many creationists would disagree. Creationists often argue that evolutionists have not scientifically proven their theories to the point where “missing links” are irrefutably established.
Craig Smith and I continue to maintain that our argument in “Black Gold Stranglehold” is founded in science – in the natural sciences of geology and chemistry, in political science, and in economics … not in religion. Nor do we personally embrace all the arguments creationists and intelligent design adherents believe. For instance, we accept the geological evidence that the Earth is 4.5 billion years old, not a more recent creation.
RESPONSE - I am an atheist and an evolutionist. Obviously when religion is brought into the debate, emotions rise, and judgement becomes clouded. So let’s try to minimize its incursion. Nevertheless, one single point: if one assumes that there is a beneficient God looking after us, then it becomes worryingly easy not to care about our culture’s effect upon the environment, or to worry about conserving resources.
In other words, Kenney and his associates believe that the “biomarkers” could be picked up by the petroleum as they passed through or pooled in sedimentary rock. Moreover, Kenney rejects the claim that there are specifically “biological” chemicals. Ever since 1828 when German chemist Frederich Wohler synthesized urea from cyanic acid and ammonia, chemists have rejected the claim that there are uniquely “organic” chemicals such that “organic” chemicals carry some evidence of a vital life force that inorganic chemicals do not carry. Kenney and his Russian scientific colleagues rejected the biomarker claim that since residue chemicals in petroleum “looked like” chemicals found in plants or animals, the residue chemicals had to “come from” plants and animals.
Remarkably, the experiment worked. The scientists found they could easily produce methane, the principal component of natural gas, at temperatures around 500 degrees Celsius and at pressures of 7 gigapascals or greater. Inorganic chemicals (iron oxide, calcium carbonate and water) had been combined to produce an organic chemical – methane.
REFUTATION - here’s a quote from one of the principals in the experiment which Corsi accidentally neglected to include.
The transformation from “kerogen” to “fossil fuels” appears to be more a 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.”
REFUTATION - “[organic synthesis as] a matter of faith”: bzzt. The simple answer to this one is that Corsi did not know the technical term (which describes the experimental process) to search for.
GENERALLY - Nobody denies that some Abiogenic hydrocarbon activity takes place.
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