The Russian-Ukrainian School of Abiotic Oil
How Stalin After World War II Sought to Find Deep Earth Oil
Excerpt from my book The Truth About Energy, Global Warming, and Climate Change: Exposing Climate Lies in an Age of Disinformation
In the West, we owe our appreciation of the Russian-Ukrainian theory of abiotic petroleum to petroleum geologist J.F. “Jack” Kenney, who owned and operated the Gas Resources Corporation in Houston, Texas. Kenney was a hands-on international oil entrepreneur affiliated with the Institute of Physics of the Earth (IPE), a part of the Russian Academy of Sciences. The IPE, founded in 1928, one of the oldest scientific institutes in the Russian Academy of Sciences, is a prominent research center of global and national geophysics. The academic side of the IPE has built university-level schools in geophysics, seismology, experimental geophysics, and geo-electromagnetic research. In the 1960s, Kenney began coauthoring scientific publications with geologists at the IPE who were doing leading research into the abiotic theory of the origin of oil. Kenney coauthored these articles with credentials both from the IPE and from his Houston corporation. Though he passed away in 2004, https://www.gasresources.net/energy-resources contains an excellent description of his work and an archive of the essential papers he coauthored with Russian IPE geoscience colleagues.
After World War II, Stalin determined that the Soviet Union would never be vulnerable again because of a dependence on foreign oil. In 1947, the U.S.S.R. had limited oil resources, the largest of which were still the Baku oil fields in present-day Azerbaijan. Russian petroleum geologists were convinced that the Baku oil fields were depleting and near exhaustion after World War II. During the war, Russia had occupied Iran, but U.S. President Harry Truman was determined to force Russia out of Iran, believing the Soviets were bent on expansion. Truman took the case to the United Nations and accused the Soviets of interfering with a foreign nation. On March 25, 1946, the Soviets announced they would begin withdrawing their military forces from Iran within six weeks. As Kenney described, Stalin responded by initiating a “Manhattan Project”–type effort after the pullout from Iran to study every aspect of petroleum to ascertain if Russia had any commercially exploitable petroleum reserves within the country.
By 1951, Russian petroleum geologist Nikolai Kudryavtsev articulated what today has become known as the Russian-Ukrainian Theory of Deep, Abiotic Petroleum Origins. Between 1940 and 1995, Russian scientists published more than 300 scientific publications on the Fischer-Tropsch process while obtaining some 170 Fischer-Tropsch patents. Since 1951, Russian and Ukrainian geoscientists have published hundreds of scientific papers rigorously exploring the abiotic theory. However, except for Kenney’s efforts, this body of geoscience has remained largely unknown in the West, primarily due to language.
In recent years, Swedish geophysicists have advanced much of the early work Russian and Ukrainian geoscientists did to promote the abiotic oil theory. In 2010, Vladimir Kutcherov, from the Division of Heat and Power Technology at the Royal Institute of Technology, in Stockholm, Sweden, and Vladilen Krayushkin from the Laboratory of Inorganic Petroleum Origin at the Institute of Geological Sciences in the National Academy of Sciences, in Kyiv, Ukraine, coauthored an essential article in Reviews of Geophysics. The paper bore the title “Deep-Seated Abiogenic Origin of Petroleum: From Geological Assessment to Physical Theory.” Kutcherov and Krayushkin presented their reasons for concluding the abiogenic theory had reached a new level of scientific proof. They proclaimed the following:
Experimental results and geological investigations presented in this article convincingly confirm the main postulates of the theory and allow us to reexamine the structure, size, and locality distributions of the world’s hydrocarbon reserves.
Kutcherov and Krayushkin detailed experiments conducted in Russia that resulted in 1990 with the patenting of a high-pressure chamber that, when fully sealed, reached pressures of 50 kbar and temperatures of 1,200°C for several hours. Using 99 percent pure solid iron oxide, FeO, calcium carbonate, CaCO3, and double-distilled water, H2O, the repeated experiments produced alkanes, i.e., saturated hydrocarbons, with the chemical formula CnH2n+2. The chemical synthesis closely followed the Fischer-Tropsch formula, using calcium carbonate for the source of carbon, water for hydrogen, and zinc for the catalyst in a reaction that called for the hydrogenation of carbon monoxide. The remainder of the published thirty-page scientific paper analyzed oil fields worldwide, arguing the oil fields’ characteristics are not consistent with organic oil expectations. For instance, Kutcherov and Krayushkin document natural gas and petroleum resources in Precambrian crystalline shields where there was no involvement of the sedimentary source rock.
Scientists in the United States have replicated the laboratory experiments that Kutcherov and Krayushkin discussed. In 2004, Henry Scott of Indiana University in South Bend organized a research team to see if they could produce methane in a laboratory without using organic materials of any kind. Simply put, the scientists were trying to see if iron oxide, calcium carbonate, and water would produce methane under pressures and temperatures comparable to those experienced in Earth’s upper mantle. The research team included Dudley Herschbach, a Harvard University research professor of science and recipient of the 1986 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, and other scientific colleagues from Harvard University, the Carnegie Institution of Washington, and the Lawrence Livermore National Lab.
The research protocol called for generating hydrocarbons in a chemical reaction involving iron oxide, calcium carbonate, and water at temperatures as hot as 500°C and under pressures as high as 11 GPa (gigapascals). One gigapascal is equivalent to 10,000 atmospheres. To experiment, the scientists designed a “diamond anvil cell” mechanism consisting of two diamonds, each about three millimeters high (about one-eighth inch). The tips of the diamonds pointed together to compress a small metal plate. The plate held the iron oxide, the calcium carbonate, and the water that the scientists wanted to force together. The scientists then conducted a variety of highly accurate spectroscopic analyses on the sample material that resulted. Herschbach explained the diamonds were ideal material for the experiment because, as one of the “hardest substances on earth, they can withstand the tremendous force, and because they’re transparent, scientists can use beams of light and X-rays to identify what’s inside the cell without pulling the diamonds apart.”
Again, the experiment worked. The scientists found they could synthetically produce methane, CH4, the principal component of natural gas. Laurence Fried of Livermore Laboratory’s Chemistry and Minerals Science Directorate summed up the importance of these findings as follows:
The results demonstrate that methane readily forms by the reaction of marble with iron-rich minerals and water under conditions typical in Earth’s upper mantle. This suggests there may be untapped methane reserves well below Earth’s surface. Our calculations show that methane is thermodynamically stable under conditions typical of Earth’s mantle, indicating that such reserves could potentially exist for millions of years.
Fried continued:
At temperatures above 2,200 degrees Fahrenheit, we found that the carbon in calcite formed carbon dioxide rather than methane. This implies that methane in the interior of Earth might exist at depths between 100 and 200 kilometers. This has broad implications for the hydrocarbon reserves of our planet and could indicate that methane is more prevalent in the mantle than previously thought. Due to the vast size of Earth’s mantle, hydrocarbon reserves in the mantle could be much larger than reserves currently found in Earth’s crust.
In a separate scientific paper published in Nature Geoscience, Kutcherov and his colleagues at the Geophysical Laboratory, Carnegie Institution of Washington, reported on additional diamond-anvil experiments. Here Kutcherov exposed methane to pressures higher than 2 GPa and to temperatures in the range of 1,000°K (726.85°C) to 1,500°K (1,226.85°C). It formed saturated hydrocarbons containing two to four carbons (ethane, C2H6; propane, C3H8; and butane, C4H10), molecular hydrogen, and graphite. Conversely, the research scientists found the exposure of ethane C2H6, to similar conditions resulted in methane CH4. Kutcherov and his colleagues concluded that their experiments with ethane suggested the synthesis of saturated hydrocarbons is reversible. “Our results support the suggestion that hydrocarbons heavier than methane can be produced by abiogenic processes in the upper mantle.” In an interview with the Swedish Research Council, Kutcherov spoke clearly about the results of this experimental laboratory research. “There is no doubt that our research proves that crude oil and natural gas are generated without the involvement of fossils,” Kucherov said. “All types of bedrock can serve as reservoirs of oil.” He added there is no way that fossil oil, with the help of gravity or other forces, could have seeped down to a depth of 10.5 km (6.5 miles) in the state of Texas, for example, that he noted is rich in oil deposits.
Thank you Jerome, I shall look at that website, most appreciated.
Kind Regards
JacqNSW
We are living in such amazing times where truths such as this are being revealed 🔥