Oil Forever (Revisited & Revised)

(If you failed to see the whale in the glacier calving video last week, I invite you to view the video again and see what you think of that sight not even being alluded to by the narrator. I thought it was phenomenal. But I digress...)

I wrote a column over five years ago which I titled, "Oil Forever."  In that column, I posited that petroleum is: 1) not truly a "fossil fuel," 2) available and waiting to be discovered all over, or in this case, under the earth, and 3) a renewable resource.

If you went to school back when I did, you were taught that oil came from dinosaurs. In fact, Sinclair Oil actually used a dinosaur as part of their logo.  However, logic dictates that oil could not have come from decaying dinosaurs or any other animal.  It exists in all areas of the earth, all climates, all geological formations and at all depths in the earth's mantle.  There is no way to explain how it could have gotten there.

Here is a quote from that original column:

Another interesting fact is that oil is found in the strangest places.  It is all over the Middle East, except in Israel, and maybe Jordan and Syria. I don’t think any of those countries are in OPEC.  (Well, maybe it just hasn’t been discovered there yet.)

That fact has since been revised.  Oil and natural gas was discovered in January of 2012 off the coast of  Israel.  The amount is fantastic, too.  Some estimates are as high as 250 million barrels of oil plus 1.4 million cubic feet of gas, making Israel a major player in the oil and natural gas producers of the world. 

As to the renewability of petroleum, there are many documented cases of oil wells that went dry, only to begin producing again after a period of several years.  As further proof, if you drive this country as I do, you will see many oil pumps out in the fields along our highways. Many of those pumps are dormant, but that is only a temporary part of the cycle. They are all productive; they just don't pump 24-hours a day.

Now I'm going to make another wild theoretical assumption.  If you believe in the biblical creation of the heavens and the earth, why not also ascribe to God the endless supply of energy to support mankind? 

Radical? Of course it is, but it makes perfect sense if you consider that everything God created has a regeneration factor. And if you cannot accept creationism, believe in the science of regeneration.

For example, let's examine the plant-animal renewal of carbon dioxide and oxygen. We breathe oxygen produced by plants in photo-synthesis, and the plants receive carbon dioxide produced by us when we exhale breath.

Okay, at the risk of being declared a kook, or something worse, I’m, going to go out on a limb here and make a prediction:  We are never going to run out of crude oil.

Since I’m making predictions anyway, let me go further a field and pose a theory:

The earth makes oil on a continuous basis.   It makes it due to the great pressure and heat in the mantle.  Most of it pools in depressions in the earth’s crust, of course.  How else do you explain that, although oil has been extracted from fields in the Middle East and other oil producing areas, they haven’t even started to run out of it?

           

If you have a difficult time grasping my concept and accepting the theory, think about this:  Where do all natural resources come from?  Consider water, for instance, and ask yourself how it is that the major lakes and rivers in the world never seem to run dry.  

I grew up near the Great Lakes, and I’ve been alive for almost 75 years.  All the water that has flowed from Lake Superior and Lake Michigan through Lake Huron, lake Erie and Lake Ontario and up the St. Lawrence River into the Atlantic Ocean has been doing so unabated during all those 75 years.  And that is just a drop in the bucket when compared to the time it has been going on and the vast number of water systems similar to the Great Lakes.  It boggles the mind!

So I ask you again, why is petroleum creation any different?  We don’t know where it came from, nor can we surmise that it is a finite supply.  We do know that any commodity—such as oil, or water, or food—that is declared to be in short supply creates more demand and higher prices. That might be the key to why there are always scare tactics and urban legends about shortages and scarcity of any commodity.

So I leave you with this... The glass isn't really half empty, it is half full!  In my humble opinion, it well never be empty, so I guess I must be an optimist extraordinaire. I hope you are one, too.