Abiiotic Oil: Why Oil Is Not a Fossil Fuel
The Fischer-Tropsch Process and Synthetic Oil
Excerpt from The Truth About Energy, Global Warming, and Climate Change
“Germany has virtually no petroleum deposits,” observed Anthony N. Stranges of the Department of History at Texas A&M University, noting a resource reality even today. “Prior to the twentieth century, this was not a serious problem because Germany possessed abundant coal resources. Coal provided for commercial and home heating; it also fulfilled the needs of industry and the military, particularly the navy.”[1]
In the opening decade of the twentieth century, however, Germany’s fuel requirements began to change. Germany became increasingly dependent upon gasoline and diesel oil engines to fuel automobiles and trucks. Then, the development of commercial airlines made producing aviation fuel another requirement. Germany’s ocean-going ships, including their navy, converted from coal to diesel oil as their energy source. “Petroleum was clearly the fuel of the future,” Stranges noted, and Germany had a problem. How would twentieth-century Germany develop the abundant gasoline and diesel fuel supplies needed to propel a competitive national industrial economy and mount a world-class military operation second to none in Europe without ample petroleum resources
The capital fact to note is that petroleum was born in the depths of the earth, and it is only there that we must seek its origin.
Dmitri Mendeleev, L’Origine du pétrole, 1877
In the opening decade of the twentieth century, however, Germany’s fuel requirements began to change. Germany became increasingly dependent upon gasoline and diesel oil engines to fuel automobiles and trucks. Then, the development of commercial airlines made producing aviation fuel another requirement. Germany’s ocean-going ships, including their navy, converted from coal to diesel oil as their energy source. “Petroleum was clearly the fuel of the future,” Stranges noted, and Germany had a problem. How would twentieth-century Germany develop the abundant gasoline and diesel fuel supplies needed to propel a competitive national industrial economy and mount a world-class military operation second to none in Europe without ample petroleum resources?
In 1925, Fisher and Tropsch began using an iron-zinc oxide preparation as their first catalyst. They went into commercial operation with a cobalt catalyst. In 1937, the Kaiser Wilhelm Institut für Kohlenforschung (Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Coal Research) developed, on a laboratory scale, alkalized precipitated iron catalysts that ultimately became the standard for commercial Fischer-Tropsch operations.
From 1935–1940, Ruhrchemie (Ruhr Chemical) A.G. in Germany developed the Fischer-Tropsch process on a large commercial scale using synthetic gas containing two volumes of hydrogen per volume of carbon monoxide, compressed to about 7 atm through a granular bed of cobalt catalyst at 185°–205°C. The major products of the synthesis were wax, oil, water, gaseous hydrocarbons, and a small amount of carbon dioxide.
The hydrocarbons produced were largely straight-chained alkanes, i.e., saturated hydrocarbons, with the chemical formula CnH2n+2. As German scientists refined the Fischer-Tropsch process through World War II, the process produced twenty different hydrocarbon chemical compounds, ranging from propane (C3H8) to n-butane (C4H10) to benzene (C6H6) to n-octane (C8H18) to n-eicosane (C20H42). With the Fischer-Tropsch process, German scientists could produce synthetic gasoline, diesel fuel, and aviation fuel from coal.[2]
The theory of the abyssal abiogenic origin of petroleum confirms the presence of enormous, inexhaustible resources of hydrocarbons in our planet and allows us to develop a new approach to methods for petroleum exploration and to reexamine the structure, size, and location of the world’s hydrocarbon reserves.
Vladimir Kutcherov and Vladilen Krayushkin, 2010
So, by the 1920s, Fisher and Tropsch had developed a process to produce synthetic hydrocarbons. Their process involved passing hydrogenated carbon gas (H + CO) through an iron (Fe) catalyst at high pressure and intense heat. The result produced methane (CH4) synthetically. For our discussion here, the importance of the Fischer-Tropsch process was the demonstration that hydrocarbons could be produced synthetically on a commercial basis without the involvement of any organic materials—no microbes, no dead plants, no decaying animals.
The Fischer-Tropsch process alone proves hydrocarbon fuels are not necessarily organic in origin, a point Wöhler’s synthesis of urea had prefigured a century earlier, in 1828. Some may object that the coal used in the Fischer-Tropsch process is a fossil fuel. We would add that biomass can also be used in the Fischer-Tropsch process to produce synthetic hydrocarbons. But the critical chemical reaction, as German scientists began proving in the early 1900s, was the catalytic hydrogenation of carbon monoxide (CO and H2) to form C1 hydrocarbons like methane (CH4) and methanol (CH3OH).[3]
[1] Henry H. Storch, Ph.D., chief, Research and Development Branch; Norma Golumbic, M.S., technical assistant, Research; and Robert B. Anderson, Ph.D., physical chemist, Research and Development Branch, Office of Synthetic Liquid Fuels, Bureau of Mines, U.S. Department of Interior, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, The Fischer-Tropsch and Related Syntheses (New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1951), pp. 1-3, and 11. Again, this chapter will closely footnote all sources. When possible, discussions from the sources will be paraphrased if not quoted directly. When paraphrasing adds undue complexity to the text, word-for-word sections will be used here, as sparingly as possible.
[2] Ibid.
[3] G.A. Somorjai, “The Catalytic Hydrogenation of Carbon Monoxide. The Formation of C1 Hydrocarbons,” Science and Engineering, Volume 23, Issue 1-2 (1981; published online December 5, 2006), pp. 189-202, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/03602458108068075.
[1] Anthony N. Stranges, Department of History, Texas A&M University, prepared for presentation at the AIChE 2003 Spring National Meeting, New Orleans, LA, March 30-April 3, 2001, unpublished.