Robert W. Endlich
INTRODUCTION
Abiotic Oil? Deposits of oil WITHOUT the changes in decayed biologic materials such as plants, algae and plankton, buried in sedimentary basins, and then compressed, heated, and transformed into hydrocarbon deposits to be used by man, eons later. Is that possible? We explore this topic. But it is not without controversy!
In recent decades, published results indicate that abiotic, sometimes called “abiogenic,” oil might be the origin for some of the hydrocarbon deposits of fuels. What follows is an introduction to this very possibility, and as we will soon see, probability, based on observations made on the various continents and published by Nature, The American Geophysical Union, Harvard, and Researchgate.net.
My undergraduate work was as a Geology Major at Rutgers, graduating in 1962; in those years draft into military service was obligatory for young men, and the Air Force soon sent me to Texas A&M for a year to qualify as a Weather Officer, and so I went on to a career in another Earth Science, Meteorology. But I still have a fondness for geological topics.
The earliest mention of an abiotic source for hydrocarbon fuels I found in my research for this post was a small 17 Nov 1991 News Note by Peter Continue reading “Abiotic Oil?”