Can
Hydrocarbons Form in the Mantle Without Organic Matter?
Could Deep Source
Hydrocarbons Migrate Up Into Oil and Gas Reservoirs?
Republished from a Carnegie Institution press release, July 2009
This story is huge – When I was a child we were
taught that oil and coal came from prehistoric plants and animals hence these were
called Fossil fuels. The idea was that these resources took millions of years to
form and thus with no current supplies of plants and animals ending up deep in
the earth Oil, Coal and Natural Gas were rare and limited in nature and so once
they were used up in some local they were gone for good.
More recently science has taught that oil in particular comes from small
insects one drop of oil per bug, and as recent as two years ago a man
discovered that there is a bacteria living in nature that can convert plants
and garbage into oil.
The implications in this article have been completely overlooked -- that right
under our noses oil and natural gas are being created daily. (Oil and Natural Gas are renewable energy)
Crunching the numbers on the fossil fuel
notion. If one were to
take all the dinosaurs and all the trees and vegatation and cramed it all
together in one spot there would not be enough matter to create even one major
oil reserve like in Saudi Arabia – much less the trillions of barrels of oil
and Cubic meters of Natural Gas globally availible since 1880 – 2009 with
Trillions of Barrels of Oil and Trillions of Cubic Meters of Natural Gas still
remaining untapped.
The oil and gas that fuels our homes and cars started out as
living organisms that died, were compressed, and heated under heavy layers of
sediments in the Earth's crust. Scientists have debated for years whether some
of these hydrocarbons could also have been created deeper in the Earth and
formed without organic matter. Now for the first time, scientists have found
that ethane and heavier hydrocarbons can be synthesized under the
pressure-temperature conditions of the upper mantle —the layer of Earth under
the crust and on top of the core. The research was conducted by scientists at
the Carnegie Institution's Geophysical Laboratory, with colleagues from Russia and Sweden, and is published in the
July 26, advanced on-line issue of Nature
Geoscience.
Methane (CH4) is the main constituent of natural gas, while ethane
(C2H6) is used as a petrochemical feedstock. Both of
these hydrocarbons, and others associated with fuel, are called saturated
hydrocarbons because they have simple, single bonds and are saturated with
hydrogen. Using a diamond anvil cell and a laser heat source, the scientists
first subjected methane to pressures exceeding 20 thousand times the
atmospheric pressure at sea level and temperatures ranging from 1,300 F° to
over 2,240 F°. These conditions mimic those found 40 to 95 miles deep inside
the Earth. The methane reacted and formed ethane, propane, butane, molecular
hydrogen, and graphite. The scientists then subjected ethane to the same
conditions and it produced methane. The transformations suggest heavier
hydrocarbons could exist deep down. The reversibility implies that the
synthesis of saturated hydrocarbons is thermodynamically controlled and does
not require organic matter.
The scientists ruled out the possibility that catalysts used as part of the
experimental apparatus were at work, but they acknowledge that catalysts could
be involved in the deep Earth with its mix of compounds.
"We were intrigued by previous experiments and theoretical
predictions," remarked Carnegie's Alexander Goncharov a coauthor.
"Experiments reported some years ago subjected methane to high pressures
and temperatures and found that heavier hydrocarbons formed from methane under
very similar pressure and temperature conditions. However, the molecules could
not be identified and a distribution was likely. We overcame this problem with
our improved laser-heating technique where we could cook larger volumes more
uniformly. And we found that methane can be produced from ethane."
The hydrocarbon products did not change for many hours, but the
tell-tale chemical signatures began to fade after a few days.
Professor Kutcherov, a coauthor, put the finding into context: "The notion
that hydrocarbons generated in the mantle migrate into the Earth's crust and
contribute to oil-and-gas reservoirs was promoted in Russia
and Ukraine
many years ago. The synthesis and stability of the compounds studied here as
well as heavier hydrocarbons over the full range of conditions within the
Earth's mantle now need to be explored. In addition, the extent to which this
'reduced' carbon survives migration into the crust needs to be established
(e.g., without being oxidized to CO2). These and related questions
demonstrate the need for a new experimental and theoretical program to study
the fate of carbon in the deep Earth."
This research was supported by the U.S.
Department of Energy, the National Nuclear Security Agency through the
Carnegie/DOE Alliance
Center, the National Science Foundation, the W.M. Keck Foundation, and the
Carnegie Institution.
The Carnegie Institution for Science (www.CIW.edu) has been a pioneering force
in basic scientific research since 1902. It is a private, nonprofit
organization with six research departments throughout the U.S. Carnegie
scientists are leaders in plant biology, developmental biology, astronomy,
materials science, global ecology, and Earth and planetary science.