Abiotic Oil, Again

There is substantial evidence that, as a civilisation, we have reached or are near peak oil. Peak oil is a term which refers to the idea that the flow of oil is now on a downward path; that it will cost more and more to extract oil; and that, though there may be a great deal of oil left, it is to be found at such depths, in such heat, and at such pressure, that it is simply uneconomic to extract it except at a very high cost. It may also be technologically difficult to do.

Assessing whether we are at Peak Oil is complicated by several factors. These include a worldwide lack of refineries; the duplicity of many oil producers, and particularly Saudi Arabia; speculation in oil contracts and futures; and the influence of regional instability and war upon price. Yet many have now come to the conclusion that oil is at its peak flow and that therefore the oil economy is approaching its end.

In such circumstances, the price of oil will not inexorably rise. Instead, since the supply is growing by less than the requirements of growth-based economies, new ways of running and providing for daily life will have to be pursued. In addition, growth in demand will have to be met with the destruction or suppression of demand elsewhere.

Further, the body of rights and legal processes we have built upon the expectation that any physical or financial differences between individuals can be compensated by technology, the proceeds of growth, or a politics based upon individual rights and the capacity of the individual to sustain themselves in work, may be displaced. Similarly, the idea that technology can displace domestic tasks in such a way as to allow multi-income households may also come under challenge.

A fall in oil availability or a rise in its cost will directly press upon food prices, and the availability of artificial fertilizer. This, combined with the use of food land for energy crops, and the use of grain for animal feed, will place food security near the top of political concerns.

So it is inevitable that some will seek, as a sort of spastic intellectual reflex, to look for fundamental ways out of the dillemae to come. One way is to dust down the idea mooted in the Soviet Union and reinforced by a 'maverick' scientist called Thomas Gold that oil is not a fossil fuel but is in fact produced by geological processes. It would be wrong to pretend that there are not lots of Russian scientists distinct from both influences who have also written on this theme. You can read about them here.

The argument for abiotic oil is superficially seductive, but has almost no scientific backing in the West. It would be wrong to say that there is not some evidence for it, but my impression is that such evidence is refutable and tendentious, at the moment. The discovery of large amounts of non-organically derived oil on other planets or moons, such as is hinted at in recent Titan missions, may deepen the debate.

Devil's Kitchen, a Libertarian site, has been provoking debate on abiotic oil from its readers. Many of these are well informed. Here is a link to a well-informed science writer, Peter Dizikes, based in Boston, which seeks to refute the abiotic oil idea. His article, hosted by Salon.com (which I love as a magazine) is cogent and very interesting.

Dizikes also makes the point that Abiotic oil has become an idea that is attractive to the furthest, but most virulent strains, of the American right. The link provided is to a relatively mild example thereof, though 'left-wing' groups also pose such questions. They do so, presumably, because they expect oil scientists to lie or to operate under some conspiracy of business, and because they distrust large corporations.

The conservative and populist critics of oil are individuals are interesting to me. They are people who tend almost automatically to react strongly against the nepotism or perceived dissonance from tradition and moral dissolution of elites by raising questions they think that others will not allow. So, in the past, for instance, such people have embraced ideas ranging from the relationship of IQ to race, conspiracy theories of politics, and projected global plans for 'North American Union' with a great deal of passion. I am not linking to any of those ideas in this post.

I think that they do so for various reasons. Take the way in which American life is disorienting and, beneath the surface, subject to tremendous psychological processes of assimilation, reconnection, narcissism, and social instability. In such circumstances, a chancer's lack of trust in other people's truths is very American. If tax collection were attached to a lottery in America, very few would evade no matter how low the chance of winning, and a similar outlook applies to ideas.

In addition to this, a religious culture which in some ways is, and always has been innovative, anticatholic, and populist might encourage one to question received wisdom and 'elites'.

I don't want any reader to think that I am necessarily making a cheap 'pro-catholic' point there, by the way. Anyone familiar with Italy's semi-insane culture of dietrologica, or even with the works of say, Ignatius Donnelly or Peter Dale Scott (who I do not know as a Catholic but believe emerged from Montreal), will see what nominal catholics or people in nominally catholic cultures are capable of.

A Scots-Irish culture, and a social divergence between the attitudes of the professional and managerial classes, versus military, agricultural and urban working castes, also leads to contrarianism. That an equally vivid and different culture exists on the left amongst academics, Jewish and orthodox communities, and those frustrated by circumstance should not detract from this point.


So, people who embrace ideas such as 'climate change isn't really happening' or 'abiotic oil exists' aren't necessarily nuts. Yet large numbers of them aren't engaging in scientific enquiry so much as in social spasm. Some, like the scientific commentators on Devil's Kitchen, and others, are I think seeking proof before they'll be convinced, but others prove themselves credulous conspiracists who see reified curiosity as the only marker of rationality.

My advice to people, as an historian and not a scientist, is to step back and ask, the next time you think you know what you know about opposition to GM food, to globalisation, or to peak oil, where your questions and ideas are really coming from. Louis Agassiz, for instance, when he was attacking Darwin's ideas, 'built an edifice of data' and made it a monument of science, when it fact it was motivated by inductive faith. Darwin built a machine to generate ideas, and won the day because his thought-child survived. Trace the intellectual context and history of an idea before you embrace it.

Some, of course, are worth defending. Here is a song and a video to which I have linked before, but which I dreamt of the other night, and which I felt a tear form for, once.