Customer Reviews

The Deep Hot Biosphere: The Myth of Fossil Fuels

5 star:		(16)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This morning's New York Times featured an article "Methane in Deep Earth: A Possible New Source of Energy" reporting on new research that partly confirms the claim in this book-- that the methane deep in the earth's mantle is primordial (not due to decayed buried vegetation) and is the source of petroleum. The article showed how methane can be generated from water and carbonate rock when the applied pressure is equal to that found in the mantle.

Gold's book describes research done largely by Russians and Ukrainians on the origin of oil, which has been shamefully discounted and ignored in the West. The Western dogma, he claims, is just another one of those things that nearly everyone believes, but is wrong.

I love books like this. It opens up a whole new world of important ideas and questions that need to be addressed, and make the scientific dogmatists who have "proved" their hypothesis by superficial reasoning from the most meager of data, coupled with proof by endless repetition, look as foolish as the geologists who rejected continental drift, or the idiots who still revere Freudian psychoanalysis.

Evidence that he presents is pretty convincing and is a good example of how many diverse lines of evidence can make the convergence on the truth inevitable. Many of the pieces of evidence were quite unknown to the formulators of the "fossil fuel" dogma who emphasize the limited reserves available for extraction. The composition of the gas giant planets with their tremendous quantities of methane can be used to plausibly argue for primordial gas on earth as well. The increasing realization among petroleum geologists that at least some petroleum reservoirs are being filled from below is startling news to many readers. The biological "markers" seen in petroleum are introduced by bacteria to petroleum on its migration toward the surface provide an alternative and plausible explanation of the facts. That Ukraine generates a third of its oil from reservoirs below all sedimentary rock is astounding.

As a physicist at the corporate research labs of a major oil company, I've sat through many presentations of petroleum exploration experts with their tables of C13 data, interpreted as signs of age and origins of oil, and I even then recognized the signs of smoke and mirrors. I only wish I'd read Gold earlier...

Gold's book is also concerned with many other aspects of the consequences of the presence of biology deep within the earth that are just as intriguing. That microbes exist deep in the earth and have a life style entirely independent from photosynthetic energy from the sun is an idea that is only now beginning to be accepted by some of the more daring Western petroleum engineers. Russians have known this for more than fifty years. The idea that better earthquake predictions can be made, and that fossil fuel reserves are much greater than publicized in the popular press, are big, important ideas that would have tremendous political impact if true.

I very much enjoyed Gold's style of writing, which is clear and straightforward, and the story he tells is a very important one, deserving of much more attention and research. The book has a gratifying number of illustrations and is well organized. The notes give a good introduction to the scientific literature on the subject, but I think some criticism can be leveled at Gold for writing as though he had been a major discoverer of many of the pieces of evidence, when he is actually playing more of a role as a popularizer for the findings of the Russians and others. But reviewers, and even popularizers, are not to be sneered at. They play an important and honorable role in the progress of science--Gold does an outstanding job here. Well worth reading.

This is a very well written book. It presents a sequence of inter-related arguments suggesting radical re-thinking of the source of oil and gas on earth, the causes of earthquakes, and the origins of life. The arguments are consistent and to me, with no formal training in chemistry, physics or geology, convincing. What persuaded me most, was the way Gold's arguments tie-in with other research which correlate the discovery of oil and gas deposits with impact craters from asteroids, and many recent reports of new life forms in caves, in rocks, and under the sea. Life forms that thrive independently of solar energy. I have two reasons for giving this book a four star rating, instead of a five star rating. First, geologists I have talked to about the book have presented counter-arguments that might have been foreseen by Gold and answered in this book. (Those arguments have not convinced me Gold is wrong.) Second, the book would have been stronger if Gold had tied in the research I mentioned at the end of the previous paragraph. Still, Gold is only one man! And he writes much better than I do. Buy the book if you are willing to think outside the box.

Thomas Gold has written a real eye-opener: Oil and gas, and even black coal, derive from primordial hydrocarbons buried deep in the Earth, dating back to the Earth's formation. He convinced me before I was a third-way through the book. It is beautifully argued, by a world-renowned scientist, who has been working on this origins problem for more than 20 years. If you think that oil and gas come from decomposed organic matter, as the standard explanation has it, then think again -- or better yet, let Thomas Gold walk you through the issues from top to bottom, and let the scales of error fall from your eyes.

Besides hydrocarbons, Thomas Gold also has some very enlightening things to say about earthquakes (chapter 8). The quality of Gold's book, and the magnitude of its enlightening content, reminds me of "Inventing the AIDS Virus" by Peter Duesberg, which I read a few months ago, and which I found similarly enlightening, albeit on an unrelated subject. Both men are gurus: dispellers of darkness. And as with Duesberg's book, the explanatory content in "The Deep Hot Biosphere" is very good: you do not have to be a chemist or geologist or biologist to understand the book: specialist terminology is explained in context as needed.

The phrase `paradigm shift' gets thrown around pretty loosely these days, but this book represents the real thing. For many years Thomas Gold has been the prime proponent of a theory that, if true, would change many commonly accepted theories in both geology and biology. In short, he believes that "fossil fuels' are generated be deep, underground methane sources that feed a vast subterranean biosphere of bacteria. If Gold is right, a lot of what we have been teaching for the last century is wrong. This is the kind paradigm shift that, literally, would require that the text books be rewritten. Scientists will not accept it unless the evidence is overwhelming. Gold recognizes this and he supports his theory with a great deal of evidence representing several independent lines of reasoning. In my mind, he succeeds in making his case. I opened the book as a skeptic, but I am now convinced that Gold is probably right. I look forward to watching the new consensus emerge.

I am very impressed with 'The Deep Hot Biosphere." Dr. Gold (an iconoclast, it seems) boldly rethinks some very basic assumptions about the formation, and role of, oil, coal, and natural gas. These are not, he says, (with the exception of some soft coals & peat) produced by decaying vegetable matter and dead sea creatures but are pre-existent in the earth and modified by such geological processes as heat, pressure, and chemical oxidation. Some vested interests will not like his conclusions.

His theory of earthquakes, too, flies in the face of conservative paradigms and is a useful adjunct to explain those earthquakes that traditional theories have difficulty with (such as the devestating New Madrid quakes of 1811-12.) The book looks at the very interesting evidence of bacteria happily living deep in the earth's crust, possibly larger in biomass than all above-ground life put together. Was this where life on earth began? And if it did, what's to stop similar organisms from living on other planets, even in our own solar system? Throughout, the book is, refreshingly, clearly written and not at all plodding or condescending.

Multinational oil companies use microbes that feed on oil to break up oil spills by digesting oil. Evidently the fossil fuel myth is just for public consumption. Gold tells us in this book that Vietnam's White Tiger oil field is producing oil from basement rock, and that hundreds of holes have been drilled down to oil and gas found in basement rock in Russia(Tatarstan), Canadian Shield, and Swedish Siljan Shield.

Even if it is at this time difficult to produce oil or gas from basement rock in most instances, due to the depth of wells, the discovery of oil welling up from below sedimentary rock frees us from the fossil fuel myth. Reserve calculations for oil and gas fields are based on the false assumption that those resources are fixed pockets of fossil fuel, rather than waystations for oil and gas welling up from below. We can stop cannibalizing each other for oil according to the fossil fuel propaganda, and we should not allow gasoline to be priced as if in blood.

Fascinating reading...microbes freeing oxygen from iron oxide(leaving magnetite, marking accessible oil for us) so they can oxidize petroleum as food, cells surviving at temperatures high enough to make steam because steam cannot form at such pressure.

An iconoclstic book threatens everything we knew about oil and its origins

[Disclaimer: I am not a creationist. Nor am I a supporter of its fake twin, intelligent design.]

This book could easily be titled, "Everything You Want to Know About the Formation of Oil, But Were Afraid to Ask - Is Wrong!" Is the author correct, or is he a bit too much of a flake on this issue? Gold died in 2004, but he certainly had the credentials (though I don't set a lot of store in those, necessarily). He was a member of the American Academy of Science, and a member of The Royal Society. You can't get any higher than those, unless you count the Nobel Prize.

So, what is he claiming? That oil isn't formed by swamps from the Permean Age settling their leaves, layer by layer, then getting compressed over millenia. He claims that what we learned in science class about salt domes is not where oil is found. Oh, oil was found there, but those were the easy locations. It has, he claims, been found in all kinds of other geological structures, and he is right about that. But most of us don't know that, do we? But the oil geologists do know it. The geological structures in which oil is found now are all over the map, literally and figuratively. No one existing theory can tell us why that is so, but in this book Gold tries to.

The status quo tries to explain oil showing up in other places - places it shouldn't BE - by speculating (and it IS only speculation) - that it migrates sideways, sometimes for many, many miles, from the (speculated) "right" places to the (actual) "wrong" places, where the oil geologists manage to wander upon it.

Gold's physics I cannot verify for sure, because I am not up on all of it. but what I CAN understand sounds good to me. I am a mechanical engineer, so I can have at least a semi-informed opinion, and to me it sounds at least worth looking into.

In the long view, whichever theory is correct will show out in the end, won't it? It may be 100 years, or it may be 200 years, but either the existing theory will prove out, or we will continue to find oil in places it "shouldn't" be (including our "depleted" oil fields).

I particularly like Gold's expansion of the argument to coal. Coal was laid down - so we are told - in essentially the same method as we are told oil was - swamps, layer-upon-layer, decaying, pressure, heat, time, etc. Lots of time. LOTS of time. But it all started out with swamps. Or did it? Then why - cutting diagonally across what is supposed to be tens and hundreds of thousands of years of layers of coal - are there tree trunks, spanning all those years? Heck, just the roots are projecting across a thousand years or more - what held the tree up all that time, while the layers formed around it? And why didn't it decay in all that time?

Why do I like this part? Because I have seen this myself. Am I imagining this? Am I misreading what my eyes told me? No, that was almost countless years of layers of coal, and that was one tree - intact - slicing through all those layers of "time". How did it happen? I don't know, but I do know that there is no way that that coal formed like they claim, not with that tree there. The tree would be turned to dust or mold long before 1/100th of those layers were laid down. Maybe the layers don't represent time, after all. But if not, then what DO they represent? I honestly don't know...

As to oil, Gold's theory, if correct, would have one hell of an impact on our thinking.

How so?

Well, if Gold is correct, and swamps from the Permean are not the source of oil, but it is created continually, down in the earth's mantle, THEN WE DON"T RUN THE RISK OF RUNNING OUT OF OIL - AND ALL PREDICTIONS OF PEAK OIL ARE WRONG.

Let me repeat that, for the casual reader:

There is a top scientist who is on record as saying that oil is NOT non-renewable. That actually would mean that it IS renewable. And that means our polluting can keep on going, I guess! (That was a joke...)

Gold also does us all a big favor in pointing out something that almost no one knows:

When oil fields are depleted, they sometimes re-fill with oil.

When someone first told me this, I was incredulous. But if it is true, what does that mean?...

...I don't agree with everything Gold says. Toward the end of this book, Thomas Gold overextends his ideas a little bit, getting a bit too ambitious for his theory, IMHO, but who can blame him?

I give the book a 95 out of 100.

I cannot say enough good things about this book. It is not just a window into the Earth, but a window into the sources of organic compounds in carbonaceous meteorites, the early history of "Fox Holes" in the asteroid parent bodies, even the conditions on (and under) Mars - to say nothing of Europa, Ganymede, Enceladus, Titan, and beyond. Some of his ideas are downright creepy, but as every one of his colleagues will attest, during his lifetime Thomas Gold has been right about too many creepy things to ever be dismissed out of hand.

My family has been in the oil business almost since it began. Being a very curious person, I received satisfactory explanations on every aspect of the business with one exception; how oil was created. I have never believed that crude oil came from dinosaurs and plants. Everyone else seems to believe it but I didn't and so I looked for a more satisfactory explanation. That is how I came upon Mr. Golds book. His theory on the origin of oil is so compelling and answers so many questions, I have few doubts he will be proven correct in the future. In looking at this problem from so many different disciplines, he can see things that most people just cannot see.

I was very impressed Dr. Gold's crisp and persuasive arguments for the deep and non-biological origin of petroleum. Dr. Gold pictures the greater part of the Earth's biosphere infiltrating the rocks of the upper crust, where autotrophic bacteria feed on virtually limitless upwelling hydrocarbons from the planet's interior -- a hypothesis that culminated in the fascinating "Siljan" experiment in 1987, in which tens of millions of dollars were invested drilling a 5-mile well into the granite of Switzerland in search of non-biological hydrocarbons. Dr. Gold states that crude oil and other hydrocarbons were recovered from rocks where conventional geology said they could not exist. Unfortunately, this may not meet Carl Sagan's threshold of "extraordinary evidence," since his work seems to have been largely ignored by modern geologists. Nevertheless, this tightly reasoned and polished book made a believer out of me. Among other fascinating statements, Dr. Gold believes the world's oil reserves are actually slowly "recharging," and that life originated within the Earth's crust. I certainly recommend this book to anybody with an interest in oil, geology or the origin of life.

-- Auralgo