Now that “peak oil” is a household phrase, armchair energy philosophers debate grand questions. When will supply end? Will it be market prices or government policies that force a large-scale transition to different fuel sources? How will it be possible to soften the blow when raw material for 90 per cent of the goods society consumes disappears or becomes too expensive to extract?

Only the guys in the business can be overheard, amid talk of de-industrialization and an oil-free world, telling each other that new technology will enable them to extract harder-to-reach fossil fuels and save them from the ugly reality of no longer being able to sell their wares.

What rarely, if ever, enters the debate is the game-changing question of whether fossil fuels are in fact, fossil fuels. And they are not, says geologist Vladimir Kutcherov in a rolling Russian accent. Oil and gas are generated by physical and chemical processes under pressure – not, as conventional wisdom has it, as residues of organic matter that have been squeezed and heated by various geological processes over millions of years.

The concept of the abiogenic origin of petroleum was developed by Russian and Ukrainian scientists during the last half century and has three main points, says Kutcherov in an Alberta Oil interview from his home in Sweden. First, he explains, hydrocarbon compounds are chemically generated in the upper mantle of the Earth. Then they migrate through deep faults into the crust of the Earth. “There they form oil and gas deposits in any kind of rock – crystalline basement, volcanic and volcanogenic rocks – in any kind of structural position.”

If Kutcherov is right, then the implications are enormous: “Hydrocarbons were generated, are generating and will be generated forever. This is a natural outgassing process of our planet.” Or in layman’s terms, Earth will never run out of oil and gas.

The theory of the abiogenic origin of petroleum predates the green movement. So it can’t be dismissed as an oil company invention meant to stifle creation of new fuels that do not generate carbon dioxide exhaust. It is hard to imagine that even oil companies would be entirely thrilled if the supply were limitless. This would revive the early days of black gold rushes and has potential to cause a collapse of prices for one of the world’s most precious commodities.

Scientifically, the main disadvantage of this different theory has been the absence of experimental data, says Kutcherov. However, in the last few years, the Russian scientist and his colleagues at Sweden’s KTH Royal Institute of Technology have made some progress. Their recent results, received by the geophysical laboratory at the Carnegie Institution in Washington, D.C., indicate that at least natural gas (as a mixture of methane, ethane, propane and butane) can be produced in a laboratory by modeling the conditions of the upper mantle of the Earth. These results were confirmed by a team of American colleagues, he adds.

Kutcherov also points to data from Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, indicating that there are lakes or even oceans of hydrocarbons on its surface. And as all know, “There are no organic compounds in space,” he says.

Kutcherov admits that the fact that natural gas can have an abiotic genesis is not the most controversial aspect of his theory. If you were to ask geologists, he says, “Thirty to 40 per cent will agree that natural gas is abiotic in origin, and 90 per cent would say yes but add that it is a minor source of natural gas.”

Oil is a different matter. Kutcherov estimates, and a quick scan of both scientific and popular literature confirms, that 99 per cent of geologists do not believe in the abiotic origin of oil.

“What kind of geological evidence confirms our theory and do we know where people should find oil and gas deposits? The answer to the second question is yes.”

He has an answer to the first question too. According to Kutcherov’s theory, if hydrocarbons are manufactured under upper mantle conditions, they have to migrate to the Earth’s surface through faults.

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