By F William Engdahl
The good news is that panic scenarios about the world running out of
oil any time 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. US Vice President 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 1970s. I was intrigued in 2003 with something
called the 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
soaring gasoline and oil prices and to the declines in output of the
North Sea, 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 1960s 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 dinosaur remains became compressed and over tens
of millions of years fossilized and were trapped in underground
reservoirs perhaps 1,200-2,000 meters 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
regions such 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 1950s in Russia, almost unknown to the West. It claims that the
conventional US biological-origins theory is an unscientific
absurdity that is unprovable. They point to the fact that Western
geologists have repeatedly predicted finite oil over the past
century, only then to find more, lots more.
Not only has this alternative explanation of the origins of oil and
gas existed in theory, the emergence of Russia as the world's largest
oil 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 1950s, 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 1940s: Where does oil come from?
In 1956, Professor 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 "abiotic" theory -
non-biological - to distinguish it 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 planet'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 that old fields could
be revived to continue producing, so-called self-replenishing 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 is
biological residue of plant and animal fossil remains as a hoax
designed to perpetuate the myth of limited supply.
Defying conventional geology
The 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 the presence of oil. The
new petroleum theory was used in the early 1990s, well after the
dissolution of the USSR, to drill for oil and gas in a region
believed for more than 45 years to be geologically barren - the
Dnieper-Donets Basin in the region between Russia and Ukraine.
Following their abiotic 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 61 wells were drilled, of which 37 were commercially
productive, an extremely impressive exploration success rate of
almost 60%. The size of the field discovered compared to the North
Slope of Alaska. By contrast, US wildcat drilling was considered to
have a 10% success rate. Nine of 10 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 was largely unknown to Western geophysicists, who
continued to teach fossil origins and, hence, the severe physical
limits of petroleum. But 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 did 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 anti-missile
shields around Russia to cut its pipeline and port links to western
Europe, China and the rest of Eurasia.
English geographer and geopolitician 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 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 that US 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 about 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
imports from the Middle East, tariff-free, at prices so low
California and many Texas domestic producers could not compete and
were forced to shut their wells.
Vietnam success
While the US oil multinationals were busy controlling the easily
accessible large fields of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iran and other areas
of cheap, abundant oil during the 1960s, the Russians were busy
testing their alternative theory. They began drilling in a supposedly
barren region of Siberia. There they developed 11 major oilfields and
one giant field based on their deep abiotic 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.
Russian company Petrosov drilled in Vietnam's White Tiger oilfield
offshore into basalt rock some 5,000 meters down and extracted 6,000
barrels a day of oil to feed the energy-starved Vietnam economy. In
the USSR, abiotic-trained Russian geologists perfected their
knowledge and the Soviet Union emerged as the world's largest oil
producer by the mid-1980s. 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 [30.5 kilometers] deep, wide and high." In short,
an absurdity.
Western geologists do not bother to offer hard scientific proof of
fossil origins. They merely assert their belief 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 a private meeting with Cheney. Had Exxon gotten the
stake, it would have had control of the world's largest resource of
geologists and engineers trained in the abiotic techniques of deep
drilling.
Since 2003, Russian scientific sharing of knowledge has markedly
lessened. Offers in the early 1990s to share 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. Cheney
came to the job of vice president 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.
According to Kenney, Russian geophysicists used the theories of
brilliant German scientist Alfred Wegener fully 30 years before
Western geologists "discovered" Wegener in the 1960s. 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 that separated into present continents by
what he called continental drift.
Up to the 1960s, supposed US scientists such as Dr Frank Press, the
White House science adviser, referred to Wegener as "lunatic".
Geologists at the end of the 1960s 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 1950s. In the meantime, Moscow holds a massive energy trump
card.
F William Engdahl, author of A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil
Politics and the New World Order, Pluto Press Ltd. To contact:
www.engdahl.oilgeopolitics.net.
(Copyright 2007 F William Engdahl.)
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