The Deep Hot Biosphere: The Myth of Fossil Fuels

by Thomas Gold

Book Overview

This book sets forth a set of truly controversial and astonishing theories: First, it proposes that below the surface of the earth is a biosphere of greater mass and volume than the biosphere the total sum of living things on our planet's continents and in its oceans. Second, it proposes that the inhabitants of this subterranean biosphere are not plants or animals as we know them, but heat-loving bacteria that survive on a diet consisting solely of...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0387952535
• ISBN13: 9780387952536
• Release Date: May 2001
• Publisher: Copernicus Books
• Length: 243 Pages
• Weight: 0.98 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 6.1" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

Gold's Logic is Sound

I knew a guy at the national laboratory in Los Alamos who knew Gold. After reading this book I mentioned it to (P. Kroenburg) and he replied, "Oh, you mean Tommy Gold? He figured out how to do things with radar during WW2 that allowed the allies to detect a submarine"s periscope". He didn't know about Gold's book, but I sure was impressed with how much the smartest guy I will probably ever know, held Thomas Gold in very high regard. Phillip Kroenburg passed away recently, and of course I never got to meet Thomas Gold. A lot of brilliant physicists are leaving our world for the next, and sometimes I wonder if we will ever again have so much collective genius. Gold's theory on petroleum's abiotic origin is more than interesting -- it is profound. Unfortunately, because of the way that scientific information is handled in the west, especially for physical sciences, a theory like this doesn't get put in a journal. I understand that there has to be a way of elevating the most serious ideas above all, but most people have never heard of this one as it gets put in with the crackpot theories on anti gravity, etc. In college, i took a lot of chemistry but never once felt much inspiration for that subject. I wonder now how things might have been different if only Gold's book had been around then. Petroleum engineering, and hydrocarbon organic chemistry, would benefit much by including Gold's theory.

Revolutionary science

This morning's New York Times featured an article "Methane in Deep Earth: A Possible New Source of Energy" reporting on new research that partly confirms the claim in this book-- that the methane deep in the earth's mantle is primordial (not due to decayed buried vegetation) and is the source of petroleum. The article showed how methane can be generated from water and carbonate rock when the applied pressure is equal to that found in the mantle. Gold's book describes research done largely by Russians and Ukrainians on the origin of oil, which has been shamefully discounted and ignored in the West. The Western dogma, he claims, is just another one of those things that nearly everyone believes, but is wrong. I love books like this. It opens up a whole new world of important ideas and questions that need to be addressed, and make the scientific dogmatists who have "proved" their hypothesis by superficial reasoning from the most meager of data, coupled with proof by endless repetition, look as foolish as the geologists who rejected continental drift, or the idiots who still revere Freudian psychoanalysis. Evidence that he presents is pretty convincing and is a good example of how many diverse lines of evidence can make the convergence on the truth inevitable. Many of the pieces of evidence were quite unknown to the formulators of the "fossil fuel" dogma who emphasize the limited reserves available for extraction. The composition of the gas giant planets with their tremendous quantities of methane can be used to plausibly argue for primordial gas on earth as well. The increasing realization among petroleum geologists that at least some petroleum reservoirs are being filled from below is startling news to many readers. The biological "markers" seen in petroleum are introduced by bacteria to petroleum on its migration toward the surface provide an alternative and plausible explanation of the facts. That Ukraine generates a third of its oil from reservoirs below all sedimentary rock is astounding. As a physicist at the corporate research labs of a major oil company, I've sat through many presentations of petroleum exploration experts with their tables of C13 data, interpreted as signs of age and origins of oil, and I even then recognized the signs of smoke and mirrors. I only wish I'd read Gold earlier... Gold's book is also concerned with many other aspects of the consequences of the presence of biology deep within the earth that are just as intriguing. That microbes exist deep in the earth and have a life style entirely independent from photosynthetic energy from the sun is an idea that is only now beginning to be accepted by some of the more daring Western petroleum engineers. Russians have known this for more than fifty years. The idea that better earthquake predictions can be made, and that fossil fuel reserves are much greater than publicized in the popular press, are big, important ideas that would have tremendous political imp

Gold's Love Oil

Multinational oil companies use microbes that feed on oil to break up oil spills by digesting oil. Evidently the fossil fuel myth is just for public consumption. Gold tells us in this book that Vietnam's White Tiger oil field is producing oil from basement rock, and that hundreds of holes have been drilled down to oil and gas found in basement rock in Russia(Tatarstan), Canadian Shield, and Swedish Siljan Shield.Even if it is at this time difficult to produce oil or gas from basement rock in most instances, due to the depth of wells, the discovery of oil welling up from below sedimentary rock frees us from the fossil fuel myth. Reserve calculations for oil and gas fields are based on the false assumption that those resources are fixed pockets of fossil fuel, rather than waystations for oil and gas welling up from below. We can stop cannibalizing each other for oil according to the fossil fuel propaganda, and we should not allow gasoline to be priced as if in blood.Fascinating reading...microbes freeing oxygen from iron oxide(leaving magnetite, marking accessible oil for us) so they can oxidize petroleum as food, cells surviving at temperatures high enough to make steam because steam cannot form at such pressure.

Compelling arguments

At first glance, this book struck me as highly suspicious. However, once I began reading it, I quickly came to seriously consider Gold's thesis as tenable. By the end of the book, I was strongly inclined to think that Gold has a much more credible explanation for the source and formation of oil and gas than the de facto one.Gold does write convincingly, but moreso he presents some very cogent reasons for his abiogenic theory. I'll not attempt to rehash the details, but just say that his theory is parsimonious, involves little hand-waving and uses no dramatics. There is nothing scientifically outlandish here, unless you have some ideological adherence to the biogenic view. In fact, the biogenic view seems now quite contrived and dubious in retrospect. Gold's view accounts not only for oil, coal and gas, but also confers reasons for formations of biogenic matter - peat and lignite - as well. Gold's further assertion that a biosphere exists going many kilometers down may have seemed ludicrous years ago, but in light of our knowledge of extremophiles nowadays, his thesis seems very plausible. As if that weren't going far enough, Gold further asserts that it is far more likely that (assuming life had a terrestrial origin) such life began deep in the earth, not in shallow tidepools or other surface environments. Any origin-of-life theory is very difficult to justify, but Gold's seems as plausible as any, and more plausible than most.A worthwhile read.

Turning the World Upside Down

The phrase `paradigm shift' gets thrown around pretty loosely these days, but this book represents the real thing. For many years Thomas Gold has been the prime proponent of a theory that, if true, would change many commonly accepted theories in both geology and biology. In short, he believes that "fossil fuels' are generated be deep, underground methane sources that feed a vast subterranean biosphere of bacteria. If Gold is right, a lot of what we have been teaching for the last century is wrong. This is the kind paradigm shift that, literally, would require that the text books be rewritten. Scientists will not accept it unless the evidence is overwhelming. Gold recognizes this and he supports his theory with a great deal of evidence representing several independent lines of reasoning. In my mind, he succeeds in making his case. I opened the book as a skeptic, but I am now convinced that Gold is probably right. I look forward to watching the new consensus emerge.

Excellent

Thomas Gold has written a real eye-opener: Oil and gas, and even black coal, derive from primordial hydrocarbons buried deep in the Earth, dating back to the Earth's formation. He convinced me before I was a third-way through the book. It is beautifully argued, by a world-renowned scientist, who has been working on this origins problem for more than 20 years. If you think that oil and gas come from decomposed organic matter, as the standard explanation has it, then think again -- or better yet, let Thomas Gold walk you through the issues from top to bottom, and let the scales of error fall from your eyes.Besides hydrocarbons, Thomas Gold also has some very enlightening things to say about earthquakes (chapter 8). The quality of Gold's book, and the magnitude of its enlightening content, reminds me of "Inventing the AIDS Virus" by Peter Duesberg, which I read a few months ago, and which I found similarly enlightening, albeit on an unrelated subject. Both men are gurus: dispellers of darkness. And as with Duesberg's book, the explanatory content in "The Deep Hot Biosphere" is very good: you do not have to be a chemist or geologist or biologist to understand the book: specialist terminology is explained in context as needed.