Thomas Gold was a brilliant scientist and very original thinker. Whilst most academics stick tightly to the prescribed boundaries of their discipline and confine their thinking to the established dogmas of the times, Gold loved ideas. And he was not frightened to rock the academic boat. He first became interested in the origins of petroleum back in the 1950s, when he engaged in discussions on the matter with fellow astronomer Sir Fred Hoyle. But it was in the late 1970s, when the USA faced a major energy crisis, that Gold aggressively moved his work on petroleum forward again.
Gold reasoned that since petroleum and its component hydrocarbons were present across the entire universe, it was inherently odd to casually assume that on Earth they must be biological in origin. He noted how earthquakes facilitated the migration of methane gas from the deep Earth to the surface, leading him to speculate that any large earthquake would fracture the ground, opening up an escape route for gas once trapped deep inside the planet’s core. Gold believed that this would explain the number of unusual phenomena associated with earthquakes, such as fires, flares, earthquake lights and gas emissions. With his colleague Steven Soter, Gold constructed a map of the world depicting major oil-producing regions and areas with historical seismic activity. Several oil-rich regions, such as Alaska, Texas, the Caribbean, Mexico, Venezuela, the Persian Gulf, the Urals, Siberia and Southeast Asia, were found to be lying on major earthquake belts. Gold and Soter concluded that these belts may explain the upward migration of gases through the ground and, subsequently, the creation of oil and gas fields.
Soon after Gold started publishing his theories, researchers discovered a number of ecosystems functioning under conditions of heat and pressure once thought impossible to sustain life. Another important piece of evidence that supported Gold’s hypothesis was the known fact that some exhausted oil wells appeared to refill from nowhere, generating huge amounts of ‘new’ crude oil. All of this led Gold to propose that the Earth may possess at least 500 million years’ worth of so-called ‘fossil fuels’.
After conducting a range of major experiments, Gold eventually consolidated his theory in his 1992 paper ‘The Deep Hot Biosphere’ in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS). Gold suggested that coal and crude oil deposits have their origins in natural gas flows that feed bacteria living at extreme depths under the surface of the Earth; in other words, oil is produced through tectonic forces, rather than from the decomposition of dead organisms. At the beginning of the paper, Gold also referred to hydrothermal vents that had recently been discovered pumping bacteria from the depth of the Earth to emerge on the ocean floor. He also noted that geologic structures where oil is found all correspond to ‘deep Earth’ formations, not the haphazard depositions found with sedimentary rock, associated fossils or even current surface life.
Sir Fred Hoyle summed up the situation as he saw it, rather succinctly: ‘The suggestion that petroleum might have arisen from some transformation of squashed fish or biological detritus is surely the silliest notion to have been entertained by substantial numbers of persons over an extended period of time.’
There have been numerous reports in recent times of oil and gas fields not running out at the expected time, but instead showing a higher content of hydrocarbons after they had already produced more than the initially estimated amount. This has been seen across the planet from the Middle East to the deep gas wells of Oklahoma and in the Gulf of Mexico, as well as many other places. It is this apparent refilling during production that has been responsible for the gross underestimate of reserves that have been published time and again. In the early 1970s it was firmly predicted that by 1987 there would be a huge energy crisis as oil and gas wells ran dry, and that there would ensue a huge shift in the wealth of nations. The natural refilling of wells is an item of the greatest economic significance, and also a key to understanding what the source of all this petroleum had been.
Even more intriguing is evidence that several oil reservoirs around the globe are refilling themselves, such as the Eugene Island reservoir – not from the sides, as would be expected from parallel organic reservoirs, but from the bottom up. Dr Gold strongly believed that oil is a ‘renewable, primordial soup continually manufactured by the Earth under ultrahot conditions and tremendous pressures. As this substance migrates toward the surface, it is attached by bacteria, making it appear to have an organic origin dating back to the dinosaurs.’
It was once thought that oil from the Middle East was a finite resource that could last 40 or 50 years at best. Yet over recent years, reserves have more than doubled. These fields have been methodically exploited since the first gusher was discovered. Today, OPEC is pumping around 30 million barrels of oil per day.
Oil-producing countries and oil-extraction companies both stand to gain financially by sticking with the fossil origin claim. If it is perceived to be a finite commodity prices will remain high, compared to a situation where it is accepted that there is an almost boundless supply bubbling up from inside our planet. In addition, governments like the fossil theory because it allows them to be seen as responsible in taxing an endangered fuel source.
