[R-G] ex peak oiler

[Gregory Meyerson]

engdahl wrote a decent book on the politics of oil.


I thought people would be interested in this and might wish to respond.


engdahl is also a global warming skeptic, I believe.



he thinks the idea of finite resources is meant to sabotage third  
world growth.


gm



War and "Peak Oil"
Confessions of an ‘ex’ Peak Oil believer

By F. William Engdahl

Global Research, September 26, 2007

Confessions of an ‘ex’ Peak Oil believer

The good news is that panic scenarios about the world running out of  
oil anytime soon are wrong. The bad news is that the price of oil is  
going to continue to rise. Peak Oil is not our problem. Politics is.  
Big Oil wants to sustain high oil prices. Dick Cheney and friends are  
all too willing to assist.

On a personal note, I’ve researched questions of petroleum, since the  
first oil shocks of the 1970’s. I was intrigued in 2003 with  
something called Peak Oil theory. It seemed to explain the otherwise  
inexplicable decision by Washington to risk all in a military move on  
Iraq.



Peak Oil advocates, led by former BP geologist Colin Campbell, and  
Texas banker Matt Simmons, argued that the world faced a new crisis,  
an end to cheap oil, or Absolute Peak Oil, perhaps by 2012, perhaps  
by 2007. Oil was supposedly on its last drops. They pointed to our  
soaring gasoline and oil prices, to the declines in output of North  
Sea and Alaska and other fields as proof they were right.

According to Campbell, the fact that no new North Sea-size fields had  
been discovered since the North Sea in the late 1960’s was proof. He  
reportedly managed to convince the International Energy Agency and  
the Swedish government. That, however, does not prove him correct.

Intellectual fossils?

The Peak Oil school rests its theory on conventional Western geology  
textbooks, most by American or British geologists, which claim oil is  
a ‘fossil fuel,’ a biological residue or detritus of either  
fossilized dinosaur remains or perhaps algae, hence a product in  
finite supply. Biological origin is central to Peak Oil theory, used  
to explain why oil is only found in certain parts of the world where  
it was geologically trapped millions of years ago. That would mean  
that, say, dead dinosaur remains became compressed and over tens of  
millions of years fossilized and trapped in underground reservoirs  
perhaps 4-6,000 feet below the surface of the earth. In rare cases,  
so goes the theory, huge amounts of biological matter should have  
been trapped in rock formations in the shallower ocean offshore as in  
the Gulf of Mexico or North Sea or Gulf of Guinea. Geology should be  
only about figuring out where these pockets in the layers of the  
earth, called reservoirs, lie within certain sedimentary basins.

An entirely alternative theory of oil formation has existed since the  
early 1950’s in Russia, almost unknown to the West. It claims  
conventional American biological origins theory is an unscientific  
absurdity that is un-provable. They point to the fact that western  
geologists have repeatedly predicted finite oil over the past  
century, only to then find more, lots more.

Not only has this alternative explanation of the origins of oil and  
gas existed in theory. The emergence of Russia and prior of the USSR  
as the world’s largest oil producer and natural gas producer has been  
based on the application of the theory in practice. This has  
geopolitical consequences of staggering magnitude.

Necessity: the mother of invention

In the 1950’s the Soviet Union faced ‘Iron Curtain’ isolation from  
the West. The Cold War was in high gear. Russia had little oil to  
fuel its economy. Finding sufficient oil indigenously was a national  
security priority of the highest order.

Scientists at the Institute of the Physics of the Earth of the  
Russian Academy of Sciences and the Institute of Geological Sciences  
of the Ukraine Academy of Sciences began a fundamental inquiry in the  
late 1940’s: where does oil come from?

In 1956, Prof. Vladimir Porfir’yev announced their conclusions:  
‘Crude oil and natural petroleum 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  
depths.’ The Soviet geologists had turned Western orthodox geology on  
its head. They called their theory of oil origin the ‘a-biotic’ theory 
—non-biological—to distinguish from the Western biological theory of  
origins.

If they were right, oil supply on earth would be limited only by the  
amount of organic hydrocarbon constituents present deep in the earth  
at the time of the earth’s formation. Availability of oil would  
depend only on technology to drill ultra-deep wells and explore into  
the earth’s inner regions. They also realized old fields could be  
revived to continue producing, so called self-replentishing fields.  
They argued that oil is formed deep in the earth, formed in  
conditions of very high temperature and very high pressure, like that  
required for diamonds to form. ‘Oil is a primordial material of deep  
origin which is transported at high pressure via ‘cold’ eruptive  
processes into the crust of the earth,’ Porfir’yev stated. His team  
dismissed the idea that oil is biological residue of plant and animal  
fossil remains as a hoax designed to perpetuate the myth of limited  
supply.

Defying conventional geology

That radically different Russian and Ukrainian scientific approach to  
the discovery of oil allowed the USSR to develop huge gas and oil  
discoveries in regions previously judged unsuitable, according to  
Western geological exploration theories, for presence of oil. The new  
petroleum theory was used in the early 1990’s, well after the  
dissolution of the USSR, to drill for oil and gas in a region  
believed for more than forty-five years, to be geologically barren— 
the Dnieper-Donets Basin in the region between Russia and Ukraine.

Following their a-biotic or non-fossil theory of the deep origins of  
petroleum, the Russian and Ukrainian petroleum geophysicists and  
chemists began with a detailed analysis of the tectonic history and  
geological structure of the crystalline basement of the Dnieper- 
Donets Basin. After a tectonic and deep structural analysis of the  
area, they made geophysical and geochemical investigations.

A total of sixty one wells were drilled, of which thirty seven were  
commercially productive, an extremely impressive exploration success  
rate of almost sixty percent. The size of the field discovered  
compared with the North Slope of Alaska. By contrast, US wildcat  
drilling was considered successful with a ten percent success rate.  
Nine of ten wells are typically “dry holes.”

That Russian geophysics experience in finding oil and gas was tightly  
wrapped in the usual Soviet veil of state security during the Cold  
War era, and went largely unknown to Western geophysicists, who  
continued to teach fossil origins and, hence, the severe physical  
limits of petroleum. Slowly it begin to dawn on some strategists in  
and around the Pentagon well after the 2003 Iraq war, that the  
Russian geophysicists might be on to something of profound strategic  
importance.

If Russia had the scientific know-how and Western geology not, Russia  
possessed a strategic trump card of staggering geopolitical import.  
It was not surprising that Washington would go about erecting a “wall  
of steel”—a network of military bases and ballistic anti-missile  
shields around Russia, to cut her pipeline and port links to western  
Europe, China and the rest of Eurasia. Halford Mackinder’s worst  
nightmare--a cooperative convergence of mutual interests of the major  
states of Eurasia, born of necessity and need for oil to fuel  
economic growth--was emerging. Ironically, it was the blatant US grab  
for the vast oil riches of Iraq and, potentially, of Iran, that  
catalyzed closer cooperation between traditional Eurasian foes, China  
and Russia, and a growing realization in western Europe that their  
options too were narrowing.

The Peak King

Peak Oil theory is based on a 1956 paper done by the late Marion King  
Hubbert, a Texas geologist working for Shell Oil. He argued that oil  
wells produced in a bell curve manner, and once their “peak” was hit,  
inevitable decline followed. He predicted the United States oil  
production would peak in 1970. A modest man, he named the production  
curve he invented, Hubbert’s Curve, and the peak as Hubbert’s Peak.  
When US oil output began to decline in around 1970 Hubbert gained a  
certain fame.

The only problem was, it peaked not because of resource depletion in  
the US fields. It “peaked” because Shell, Mobil, Texaco and the other  
partners of Saudi Aramco were flooding the US market with dirt cheap  
Middle East imports, tariff free, at prices so low California and  
many Texas domestic producers could not compete and were forced to  
shut their wells in.

Vietnam success

While the American oil multinationals were busy controlling the  
easily accessible large fields of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iran and  
other areas of cheap, abundant oil during the 1960’s, the Russians  
were busy testing their alternative theory. They began drilling in a  
supposedly barren region of Siberia. There they developed eleven  
major oil fields and one Giant field based on their deep ‘a-biotic’  
geological estimates. They drilled into crystalline basement rock and  
hit black gold of a scale comparable to the Alaska North Slope.

They then went to Vietnam in the 1980s and offered to finance  
drilling costs to show that their new geological theory worked. The  
Russian company Petrosov drilled Vietnam’s White Tiger oilfield  
offshore into basalt rock some 17,000 feet down and extracted 6,000  
barrels a day of oil to feed the energy-starved Vietnam economy. In  
the USSR, a-biotic-trained Russian geologists perfected their  
knowledge and the USSR emerged as the world’s largest oil producer by  
the mid-1980’s. Few in the West understood why, or bothered to ask.

Dr. J. F. Kenney is one of the only Western geophysicists who has  
taught and worked in Russia, studying under Vladilen Krayushkin, who  
developed the huge Dnieper-Donets Basin. Kenney told me in a recent  
interview that “alone to have produced the amount of oil to date that  
(Saudi Arabia’s) Ghawar field has produced would have required a cube  
of fossilized dinosaur detritus, assuming 100% conversion efficiency,  
measuring 19 miles deep, wide and high.” In short, an absurdity.

Western geologists do not bother to offer hard scientific proof of  
fossil origins. They merely assert it as a holy truth. The Russians  
have produced volumes of scientific papers, most in Russian. The  
dominant Western journals have no interest in publishing such a  
revolutionary view. Careers, entire academic professions are at stake  
after all.

Closing the door

The 2003 arrest of Russian Mikhail Khodorkovsky, of Yukos Oil, took  
place just before he could sell a dominant stake in Yukos to  
ExxonMobil after Khodorkovsky had a private meeting with Dick Cheney.  
Had Exxon got the stake they would have got control of the world’s  
largest resource of geologists and engineers trained in the a-biotic  
techniques of deep drilling.



Since 2003 Russian scientific sharing of their knowledge has markedly  
lessened. Offers in the early 1990’s to share their knowledge with US  
and other oil geophysicists were met with cold rejection according to  
American geophysicists involved.

Why then the high-risk war to control Iraq? For a century US and  
allied Western oil giants have controlled world oil via control of  
Saudi Arabia or Kuwait or Nigeria. Today, as many giant fields are  
declining, the companies see the state-controlled oilfields of Iraq  
and Iran as the largest remaining base of cheap, easy oil. With the  
huge demand for oil from China and now India, it becomes a  
geopolitical imperative for the United States to take direct,  
military control of those Middle East reserves as fast as possible.  
Vice President Dick Cheney, came to the job from Halliburton Corp.,  
the world’s largest oil geophysical services company. The only  
potential threat to that US control of oil just happens to lie inside  
Russia and with the now-state-controlled Russian energy giants. Hmmmm.

According to Kenney the Russian geophysicists used the theories of  
the brilliant German scientist Alfred Wegener fully 30 years before  
the Western geologists “discovered” Wegener in the 1960’s. In 1915  
Wegener published the seminal text, The Origin of Continents and  
Oceans, which suggested an original unified landmass or “pangaea”  
more than 200 million years ago which separated into present  
Continents by what he called Continental Drift.

Up to the 1960’s supposed US scientists such as Dr Frank Press, White  
House science advisor referred to Wegener as “lunatic.” Geologists at  
the end of the 1960’s were forced to eat their words as Wegener  
offered the only interpretation that allowed them to discover the  
vast oil resources of the North Sea. Perhaps in some decades Western  
geologists will rethink their mythology of fossil origins and realize  
what the Russians have known since the 1950’s. In the meantime Moscow  
holds a massive energy trump card.

F. William Engdahl is author of A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil  
Politics and the New World Order, Pluto Press Ltd..
To contact: www.engdahl.oilgeopolitics.net.

His most recent book, forthcoming with Global Research, is Seeds of  
Destruction, The Hidden Agenda of Genetic Manipulation.