Customer Reviews

Black Gold Stranglehold

5 star:		(12)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(12)

 

 

I bought this book looking forward to reading evidence that oil came from a geophysical process rather than biological. I still hope that is true, but this author has almost completely convinced me against it.

I've never read a book with so many mathematical errors. I'll give a few examples of the many that exist. There's a section from page 72-78. Throughout this section, the author uses million, billion and trillion interchangeably as if they were the same number. On page 83 he states that carbon dioxide makes up one tenth of one percent of the atmosphere. On page 85 he states that it makes up a full one percent. He then procedes to do some calculations that are off by a factor of 10. On page 103 he mentions how much carbon various countries are putting into the atmosphere. He says nothing as to time. Do they put this much out every day, year decade...who knows!

The author's main argument against his opposition is 'They're stupid because they don't believe what I believe.' He seems to think if he calls them stupid enough times in enough ways we'll start to realize what a genius he is. One example of this: He says that big oil fields are being found in the ocean below two miles of water. He ridicules the bio-oil people mentioning what idiots they must be to believe that this area must once have been above water for dinosaurs to die on it and become oil. I wonder, did it ever cross his mind that bio-material is continuously falling to the bottom of the ocean by the billions of tons. The material would thicken, come under pressure (even more than the water provides) and over millions of years plate tectonics would move it deep into the mantle.

He unashamedly says we should use all the oil we want. There's an unlimited supply and man is stupid if he thinks he's powerful enough to cause global warming. In one chapter he goes into depth explaining how great it is that we import a large part of our oil. It brings mutual international investment and interdependence. In this chapter he says the U.S. uses 20 million barrels a day getting 1.5M from Canada, 1.5M from Mexico and 1.5M from Saudi Arabia. The rest from other sources. In the next chapter he rails against importing oil. In his words, "We have never before in our history experienced this massive a transfer of our national wealth overseas." etc... In this chapter we use 21M barrels a day. We get 1.72M from Canada, 1.75M from Mexico and 1.4M from the Saudis.

In summary, this is one of the worst books I have ever read. He doesn't have a clue what he's talking about and isn't even consistent in his own words. Don't waste your money buying this book. I wish I had read the other reviews before I did.

In 1956, while studying petroleum engineering at Princeton University, I read a statement by Vladimir Porfir'yev, a prominent Russian geologist, who said, "The overwhelming preponderance of geological evidence compels the conclusion that crude oil and natural 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 depth."

My recognition of the near total vagueness of all I had studied regarding the origin of oil up to that moment made Porfir'yev's statement appear completely logical to me.

In the intervening years I read a great deal of material written by the late Thomas Gold of Cornell University, who espoused the very same scientific position on the origin of oil, which has been largely ignored by the U.S. oil industry. Not so by the Russians, who have uncovered vast reserves of oil as a result of not looking for biological decay and seismic structural traps, but rather just geologic structural traps connected to deep crustal hot spots.

Soviet scientists ridiculed the idea that an ancient, primeval morass of plant and animal remains was covered by sedimentary deposits over millions of years, and compressed for millions of more years of heat and pressure, to create oil and natural gas.


Longtime Soviet Knowledge

The story of why this theory did not advance beyond the Soviet Union is told in the excellent book Black Gold Stranglehold, along with much more about the myths of oil scarcity and the politics of oil.

The reason the theory never left Russia is that Stalin had no reason to inform his enemies, especially not Americans or the British. Also, most of the findings of the Soviet scientists were published in Russian, and few American or British scholars of the day read Russian. Besides, we were locked into the mindset that oil is a fossil fuel.

Over the past 50 years Soviet scientists have published hundreds of papers on the non-biologic formation of oil within the Earth. The theory is widely accepted in Russia, though largely unheard of in the rest of the world.

Americans have been deeply invested in the idea that we are running out of oil, and that oil companies are making unconscionable profits while destroying our environment and ignoring renewable energy sources. Any competing idea is so threatening that it has to be ridiculed and left unexamined, lest it be proven true.

How else could radical environmentalists continue their attack on the oil companies, a pillar, in their view, of American capitalism at its corrupt worst?


Challenging `Dead Dinosaurs'

In 1982, Gold said in a publication with British scientist Fred Hoyle, "The suggestion that petroleum might have arisen from some transformation of squashed fish or biological detritus is surely the silliest notion to have been entertained by substantial numbers of persons over an extended period of time."

The fossil fuel theory dates back to the Russian scientist Mikhail Lomonosov in 1757, when he stated in the Proceedings of the Imperial Academy of Science in St. Petersburg, "Rock oil originates as tiny bodies of animals buried in the sediments which, under the influence of increased temperature and pressure acting during an unimaginable long period of time, transform into rock oil."

Dimitry Mendeleyev, who first arranged the Periodic Table of Elements based on atomic mass in 1896, fiercely rejected Lomonosov's theory. Nevertheless, Lomonosov's theory took hold throughout most of the world. Mendeleyev suggested oil is primordial material, but Russians themselves did not change their minds for more than half a century, and the rest of the world never did.

I was persuaded initially, many years ago, that oil was not derived from biologic material by the very same unanswered questions stated by Corsi and Smith: "Why don't the text books show the oil transformation formulas specifying in equation form the amount of pressure that must be applied over what period of time? Where do we find the exact chemical formulae under which ancient leaves and bones became hydrocarbon petroleum? Where is the laboratory experimental proof?"


Fossil Challenge Not New

Gold's most famous book on the subject was published in 1998, The Deep Hot Biosphere: The Myth of Fossil Fuels. Gold's thinking about oil began with his primary discipline, astronomy.

As an astronomer, he was aware that hydrocarbons are abundant in the universe, where we assume no life exists. Thus, how could hydrocarbons be organic chemicals resulting from life processes on Earth? He reasoned that hydrogen--being common in the universe--could combine with carbon to form hydrocarbon whether life is present or not. This idea was evidently never passed on to geologists.

Gold reasoned that we find more oil in the Middle East than Florida or Montana because deep subsurface structures in the Middle East are more fractured there, allowing the oil to flow upward due to its low specific gravity and the rotation of the Earth. He believed the reason we find oil in sedimentary rocks is not because they encased rotting ancient forests and dinosaurs, but because sedimentary rock is porous enough for the oil moving toward the surface of the Earth to pool within it.

Corsi and Smith then describe how Gold deduced that oil, as it travels upward from deep within the Earth's mantle, is able to pick up various microbes and bacteria that live in the layers of rock through which the oil passes on its way to the Earth's surface. These microbes are adapted to living directly off the hydrocarbons that constitute the oil itself, without need of sunlight or photosynthesis.

Therefore, oil could contain evidence of living organisms and still be a completely abiotic substance (one not requiring any form of living agent to be produced). Corsi and Smith conclude that "the fossil fuel theory is limiting in that we are looking for oil in the wrong places, [and] underestimating the availability of oil because we are locked into a belief that oil will have to run out."


Peak Oil Deception

The authors lay much of the blame for this continuing confusion on the shoulders of M. King Hubbert (who happened to be one of my mentors), for telling the world in 1957 that oil production would peak in the 1970s and then decline. At the time, I questioned Hubbert to no avail, and regardless of the fact that he was known to be wrong by the time the 1980s came along, the energy doomsayers insisted that his core theory was right, but just a few decades off.

They still have not given up, despite the fact that new oil fields are being found worldwide. Today we have more proven oil reserves than ever before. There is no empirical evidence that these trends will ever stop.

The authors of Black Gold state emphatically that the world is not running out of oil. However, note the authors, this alternative hypothesis is "the one supporters of Hubbert's Peak never contemplate seriously." Hubbert's Peak proponents simply say that no matter how much oil we find around the world, eventually explorers are bound to find all of it.

Corsi and Smith nail current reality with the following observation: "Reading book after book predicting gloom and doom, we are left with the conclusion that the fossil-fuel advocates are locked into the type of thinking best characterized by Thomas Robert Malthus, whose famous 1789 essay predicted that population would ultimately outstrip our ability to produce food, resulting in a series of crises such as war and famine which in turn would cut back populations to more manageable levels."

Malthus is famous not because his theory was right but because experience proved him wrong.


Oil Reserves Growing

To support their claim that we have more accessible oil available than ever before, with a great deal more on the horizon, Corsi and Smith describe in great detail many of the newest oil fields being put into production, including ones in Kazakhstan, Iran, and countless offshore areas, all of which support their abiotic theory.

Taking data from the United States Energy Information Administration, the authors explain that in 2005 proven world reserves totaled 1.28 trillion barrels, while in 1980 the proven reserves were only 645 billion barrels.

Alarmists fail to realize that we are finding more oil all the time. Nor do they acknowledge that their predictions that we are running out of oil have always been wrong. They simply keep pushing the year we will run out of oil further decades ahead.

If Corsi, Smith, and Gold are right, that decade is unlikely ever to arrive.


Small ANWR Footprint

Corsi and Smith describe the foolishness of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) being put off-limits for resource recovery by the very same people who insist we are running out of oil. The area on which the president wishes to produce oil in ANWR, they say, compares to the size of a postage stamp on a football field.

The footprint of 2,000 acres we need against the more than 19 million acres in ANWR is only one one-hundredth of 1 percent. The object of the most vocal opponents of ANWR oil production is to stop all oil production in the United States instead of proceeding under environmentally responsible conditions.


Strongly Recommend

Black Gold Stranglehold also contains excellent chapters on the global warming hoax,described monthly on the pages of this publication, and our nuclear energy success and future potential.

Where else can you learn that we have 103 nuclear plants operating in 31 states providing the nation with 20 percent of its electric power, while Vermont, perhaps our most liberal state, gets 74 percent of its electricity from nuclear power, followed by South Carolina (55 percent), Connecticut (54 percent), New Jersey (52 percent), Illinois (50 percent), and New Hampshire (43 percent)?

I strongly recommend this book to anyone who wants to understand the world's oil supply from the point of view of economics, politics, exploration, location, and technology.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Jay Lehr, Ph.D. (lehr@heartland.org) is science director of The Heartland Institute.

Just reading how polarized these comments are -- looking at what the low-rating readers say -- made me want to read this book. There must be something here that the "fossil fuel" guys don't want us to know -- that's what I concluded. Then I read the book. Okay, a few typos -- so it's a first printing, okay. But it never made any sense that oil came from dinosaurs. This is what the oil companies want us to think. The low ratings on this book look political, like somebody's pet theory got stepped on. Let's open up our minds. Maybe the sun doesn't revolve around the Earth. Is there any harm in taking a challenging theory seriously? I don't think so. The book is easy to read and it made me think. There are a lot of people working in oil fields and in the petroleum industry who agree with what this book says, even if they don't want to get fired for saying so. Read the book and make up your own mind. That's what I think.

BLACK GOLD STRANGLEHOLD is an interesting and illuminating book about the origins of Oil and the geopolitics and economics that surround our dependence on the substance. It is, simply put, a revelation on our new understanding of the geophysical origin and wide availability of Oil that is not elsewhere readily found in the literature.
The world is not running out of Oil -- and probably never will. In fact, proven oil reserves are today greater than at any time in history. Because Oil is not a "fossil fuel" and has nothing to do with dinosaurs and decomposed forests. This has been suspected for decades, but only demostrated in the laboratory as recently as 2004, with nary a dinosaur in the room at the time!
This is an important book, well worth the read. Yes, a few sections get a little bit strident, but understandably so.
We have Oil. It's readily available, if we want it. US independence from foreign Oil is possible and within our reach. "Drill here, drill now, pay less" can become a reality. So, let's get started now.

The book is a very informative overview of the oil industry, its potential and its problems. The book discusses the sources of, production trends, unrational production hindrances and potential threats to the supply of oil. In particular the overview on the abiotic oil theory is praiseworthy. There is much scientific support for the abiotic (non fossil) source of oil, a lot of which is referenced in the book. Yet this theory has not soaked into establishment thinking in the United States.

However I am going to be bit harsh on this work. The discussion on the global warming hypothesis is good as far as it goes. In particular the exposition of the fact that only a small proportion of the carbon dioxide emitted into the atmosphere is from human sources is on target. However the authors omit much discussion of the natural sinks of carbon dioxide such as the oceans. An even graver omission is not devoting a chapter to the fallacious hockey stick (unprecented recent global warming) hypothesis endorsed by the IPCC, an organization that was supposed to be guided by carefull and verified scientific research. The refutation of the hockey stick hypothesis by two courageous Canadian researchers demonstrates the dubious nature of the claims of the establishment global warming proponents. The demise of the hockey stick is an enormously important chapter of both the global warming debate and the oil industry.

Another criticism is the suggestion as one the seven proposed steps a gold linked international dollar. The value of gold remains fairly constant in the long term but varies greatly from year to year. And the gold standard in history tended to bring recurring spouts of deep recession or depression and great unemployment.

But all in all a very good informative book. The work deserves the widest dissemination.

This book was very good; it kicked off my interest in energy; Eye opener; at the time I read it was dated; the dates were off; but read it for the info; very informative and thoughtful; I liked it; I did not put it down; read chapter by chapter.

After reading the claims that this book would turn the world on it's ear, I was expecting a whole bunch more. There's been more than 50 years of scientific research into fossil fuels, I find it difficult to believe that all of a sudden everything we know about oil is wrong. A few quoted technicians versus 1000's of teams of geologists and research specialists doesn't seem like a fair match.

This book didn't prove it to me, oil is fairly obviously becoming harder and harder to drill for, and more expensive to bring up. The Canadian Shale takes almost as much energy in natural gas to produce the oil as it's worth, and they can only generate a million barrels a day. Hardly enough to make a difference in a world that uses 89 million barrels of oil per day.

For another book in this category I highly recommend Michael Ruppert's "Crossing the Rubicon". THAT book makes sense, and scares me as a see the effects of our diminishing cheap oil supply.

Corsi and Smith certainly contribute to a better understanding about the real nature of oil and natural gas (which, in fact, are not fossil fuels) and the impact on socio-economic and enviromental issues such as peak oil myth and global warming hoax.

Corsi and Smith took a serious risk writing this book, given that the Abiotic theory is not new. The science to prove or disprove is available to anyone through the internet without much effort. Therefore, I would have assumed they would make every effort to get it right. And the verdict is in: they went to battle on the wrong horse. Given that their initial premise about the Abiotic theory is wrong, their credibility for the rest of their discussion in the book is highly questionable. Too bad, because their discussions on economics and market forces, which seems to be their field of expertise, were fairly reasoned. The geo-political discussion was confusing. For example, in one part of the book, they led me to think that buying oil from Saudi Arabia was safe because of how interdependent we had become. But later in the book, Saudi Arabia was lumped in with all foriegn imports as highly risky to our national security - funding terrorists, compromised on closing our borders, etc. In general, the attempts at balanced analysis seem kind of clumsy. As a side note, the lack of proof reading and editing is quite irritating - missing words, wrong words (internal compression engine instead of internal combustion engine), awkward phrasing. Must of been a rush job to get to print. They took a risk, both in trying to make the arguement and in controlling the quality of the writing, and they failed. It reflects poorly on them and makes me question their commitment to excellence in their primary endeavors. If you want to read the book, ask the library to get it. But don't spend your own money on it.

While the authors are well known, their background is not in the sciences or in engineering - a prerequisite to speak intelligently about oil and gas exploration. The attempt to set up "abiotic oil" as a valid source for petroleum is not only poorly done and referenced, but the examples they cite are already proven to have biogenic origin! As someone actually doing this for a living, this book is a very humorous read, chock full of unsubstantiated claims and incredibly wrong assumptions. Even the Russians now look for oil the same way we do - somehow they forgot to mention that small fact.

Great bathroom fodder...