Petroleum might not have become such a key commodity in the world had certain U.S. oligarchic circles not successfully beaten off the ethanol movement in the United States in the 1930s¹, in particular, through the Rockefeller (oil and banking, among many other things), Dupont (chemicals) and General Motors alliance which overcame the attempts of the farming lobby, supported, perhaps surprisingly, by Henry Ford². The farming lobby sought unsuccessfully to get President F.D. Roosevelt to authorize ethanol for automobile fuel.

The 1930s Economic Depression, therefore, unleashed a struggle about the future of fuel, the farm lobby arguing that if ethanol were used this would generate jobs (and income for the farmers, of course) at home. The petroleum lobby basically won this struggle, with the help of the U.S. government. F.D. Roosevelt had reason to conflict with the Rockefellers (et al) due to their continued dealings with the Nazis right up to World War II, and even during that War³.

Today, the state of the debate on energy sources is still unclear. I would say that it is still at a preliminary stage -most people are not informed about the other side of the argument. Ecologists have good reason for siding against Big Oil and supporting alternative energy, which I also believe to be plentiful, but subject to a high level of disinformation⁴. They have poor reasons for believing in petroleum depletion, or that it represents a threat to capital and lies behind the coming catastrophes mankind is thought to be facing.

The post-war oil depletion lobby traces its theories back to petroleum geologist Dr. M. King Hubbert⁵, an oil geologist working for Shell Oil who in 1956 used an oil production bell-curve to predict that U.S. oil output would peak around 1969. In 1974, he predicted that world petroleum output would peak in 1995. During the 1970s and 1980s, the same forecasting technique was used by various government authorities, oil firms and the World Bank to predict that world oil output would peak in 2000. In 1998, two petroleum experts, Colin Campbell⁶ and Jean Laherrere⁷ wrote that the coming oil crunch would be more profound than the shortages experienced in previous crises⁸. In October, 2003, Kjell Aleklett and a team of researchers at the University of Uppsala in Sweden, also associated with Colin Campbell, predicted that oil output would peak soon after 2010.

Campbell (et al) argue, however, that there are no real alternatives to petroleum. In an interview in 2002, Campbell stated that energy from wind, sun, tide, and nuclear, etc “contribute only a very small percentage” and cannot match oil in terms of cost or convenience. Nor would oil from tar-sands change the basic trend towards its imminent peak. Thus, “the simple solution is to use less”. The situation is exacerbated by “soaring population”, though this is now set to decline partly from energy shortage⁹. Campbell, therefore, paints a scenario of “war, starvation, economic recession, possibly even the extinction of Homo Sapiens¹⁰”.

Colin Campbell (and his associates) are, therefore, warning of catastrophe if the human race does not “tighten its belt”. Whether or not they are right or wrong about some kind of catastrophe in the making may not, however, depend upon their analysis of the state of oil reserves.

In September, 2001, Michael C. Lynch stated that Campbell and Laherrere’s arguments about a coming oil peak are based entirely on a very particular technical argument for which recent evidence has highlighted its fallacy¹¹. The main flaw in the argument is “the assumption that recoverable petroleum resources are fixed … If the amount of recoverable oil increases, as it has in the past, then the level predicted for peak production must increase and the [peaking] date pushed further into the future,” which, he says, “has been observed many times from forecasters using this type of model and relying on estimates of ultimately recoverable resources”.

Indeed, the estimated oil peak forecast by the depletion lobby can be seen (above) to have changed since the early 1970s (when it was put at 1989), the later 1970s/1980s (when it was put at 2000) and today (when it is put at 2010). Another problem, Lynch points out, is that Campbell and Lahererre made use of a data-base that is unavailable to most people¹². Among other things, Lynch notes that in 2000 the USGS World Petroleum Assessment used the same source as Campbell and Lahererre, concluding that reserves in existing fields would grow substantially -i.e. by 612 billion barrels or nearly 30 years of current consumption.

Oil depletion has been promoted for many years by Colin Campbell and Jean Laherrere and other people who worked for the very secretive PetroConsultants, Geneva, now known as IHS Energy Group, ownership of which traces back to the Thyssen-Bornemisza Group (with likely Rockefeller influence¹³).

The Thyssen family managed to balance its support for Hitler during World War II, through investment ties with U.S. finance capital, thanks to some highly clandestine banking arrangements¹⁴. Meanwhile, alongside fossil fuel experts like Colin Campbell and Jean Laherrère, the British section of the financially powerful Astor family appears to have significant involvement in the Oil Depletion Analysis Centre (ODAC) based in Britain¹⁵.

Reading the Peak Oil literature, it seemed to me that it went too far and Colin Campbell’s scenario pointed towards a desire to maintain oil in its privileged position. Moreover, from a conviction about the generalized abundance of resources, I began to consider whether the generally accepted scarcity of oil, put forward by PetroConsultants-IHS and others, was really supported by the evidence.

Since the 1970s oil crisis, Thomas Gold¹⁶ has been saying that hundreds of times more hydrocarbons exist down in the Earth than most geologists, oil corporations, or OPEC leaders say. “The general belief in scarcity that drives up gas prices and causes fears of inflation, Gold argues, is a mirage that has served vested interests among oil producers for decades¹⁷.” Gold’s theory that oil was not the product of prehistoric vegetation and had a primordial origin in the depths of the Earth, led me to seek others who proposed a similar view. That is how I came across the work of Dr. J.F. Kenney¹⁸, an oil consultant in Houston, Texas, who worked with Russian petrologists during the 1970s.

Kenney outlines the history of the biogenic and abiogenic (or biotic and abiotic) theories of oil, both of which had their origin in Russia¹⁹. In 1757, Mikhail Lomonosov hypothesized that oil was formed from dead marine and other animals. This was rejected about 50 years later by Alexander von Humboldt and French chemist and thermodynamicist Louis Joseph Gay-Lussac -they said oil is a primordial material that erupts from deep down in the Earth. Biasson and Sokolov developed French chemist Marcellin Berthelot’s Kolbe reaction experiments to show that petroleum is abiogenic. In the last quarter of the 19th century, Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleev examined and rejected Lomonosov’s hypothesis, concluding that petroleum is a primordial material erupted from a great depth, and even hypothesized “deep faults” through which the petroleum reached the earth’s surface.

By 1945, the Soviet government, recognizing the crucial need for petroleum in modern warfare, seeing that the United States, Britain and France would not allow them to obtain oil beyond the Communist bloc, and believing their own reserves to be very limited, established a project to study all aspects of petroleum. In 1951, the Modern Russian-Ukrainian theory was enunciated by Alexandrovich Kudryavtsev at the All-Union Petroleum Geology Congress. The first ten years were highly contentious, but by 1965 the new theory had been firmly established.

Apart from the estimates that if oil originated from vegetation then all the possible oil ever created would have long been used up²⁰, the point that oil occurs at greater depths than any fossil²¹, and the fact that petroleum occurs in many places along the edges of the Earth’s tectonic plates, a number of more technical points are argued by J. F. Kenney and a group of Russian specialists²².

Their case for abiogenic oil includes the following arguments: The laws of thermodynamics prohibit spontaneous evolution of liquid hydrocarbons in the regime of temperature and pressure within the crust of the Earth; simply because certain molecules found in natural petroleum “look like” molecules found in biological systems, does not mean the former must “come-from” the latter; the only biological molecules observed in natural petroleum are contaminants; and claims about “biomarkers” have been thoroughly discredited by observations of those molecules in the interiors of ancient, abiotic meteorites and in laboratory synthesis using the Fischer-Tropsch process.

The Russian-Ukrainian petrologists point to the theory’s success:

“There are presently more than 80 oil and gas fields in the Caspian district alone which were explored and developed by applying the perspective of the modern theory and which produce from the crystalline basement rock (Krayushkin, Chebanenko et al. 1994). Similarly, such exploration in the western Siberia cratonic-rift sedimentary basin has developed 90 petroleum fields of which 80 produce either partly or entirely from the crystalline basement. The exploration and discoveries of the 11 major and 1 giant fields on the northern flank of the Dneiper-Donets basin have already been noted. There are presently deep drilling exploration projects under way in Azerbaijan, Tatarstan, and Asian Siberia directed to testing potential oil and gas reservoirs in the crystalline basement²³.”

Thus, since oil reserves are not limited by decaying organic detritus but have a primordial origin within the Earth’s vast mantle, there can be no question of their depletion in the foreseeable future. Nor is the presence of oil the only mineral detectable by study of the Earth’s tectonic plates. An article published by the Houston Gem Mineral Society in April, 2003²⁴, makes a number of interesting statements:

“Evidence is mounting that the Earth is encircled by subtle necklaces of interconnecting, generally latitude-parallel faults. Many major mineral and energy resource accumulations are located within or near the deeply penetrating fractures of these “cracks of the world. ... A recent tectonic synthesis of Mexico ore deposits and tectonics has implications for worldwide giant petroleum accumulations and resulted from the incorporation of new constraints related to the regional geographic distribution of crustal oxidation states … In the Mexico region, over 500 additional oil and gas field occurrences were used to constrain crustal oxidation state. Petroleum occurrences can regionally coexist with other commodities (such as diamond, gold, and tin, antimony, mercury, lithium, and tantalum²⁵).”

Kenney is very critical of geologists in the West, whom he considers not to have been trained in scientific principles. I have approached several petrologists in Mexico and asked them to read Kenney’s papers and let me know what they think. What impresses me is their lack of response -despite assurances that they would get in touch with me, none have replied to Kenney’s articles. We seem to be suffering severely from hermeticism, a problem that is reproduced in the United States and around the world, nor is it simply a phenomenon in geology, or even in science.

Nevertheless, the abiogenic theory must be having some effect on the worldwide petrology community, given that Michel T. Halbouty, the doyen of American petrology, is heading a conference on it in Austria in July.

If the abyssal theory is correct and oil exists in great abundance, the forces that have dominated this world since the end of the 19th century may be caught in a tricky situation. On the one hand, if they can tighten their control of the world, they may be able to ensure that oil supplies do not outstrip their monopoly, reducing it to ashes, with concomitant effects on their overall hegemony. On the other hand, if they are to preserve their monopoly, they will also have to stifle the development of alternative solutions to humanity’s energy needs. But today, not only are the oil companies still sitting on a secret -too many of us are burying our heads in one or another belief or dogma that capitalism/humanity/the Earth itself is on the brink of self-destruction through ecological and geo-political and/or economic and financial breakdown -resource depletion, pollution and over-population, combined with capital’s mad pursuit of quick profits and war²⁶.

The origins of the present conflict in the Middle East have nothing to do with oil scarcity. However, the conflict can be explained in part by America’s desire to control oil (which has become too abundant), although this ties in with the much larger question of America’s desire to maintain and therefore to extend its worldwide hegemony, as outlined by Zbigniew Brzezinski for the U.S. Council on Foreign Relations²⁷, pursued by President Bill Clinton in Yugoslavia during the 1990s, and continued, in its own way, by the Bush Administration today. But that’s another story…

Notes

¹ The history of oil and ethanol is told in an exceptional series of articles by Bill Kovarick, starting with “The Fuel of the Future” (1998) and “Kettering and Tetraethyl Lead” (1999).

² It seems that Henry Ford’s first car ran on ethanol -see Kovarick, ibid.

³ Reference to FDR’s opposition to the Rockefellers -as dealt with in Charles Higham’s book “Trading with The Enemy; the Nazi American Money Plot, 1933-1949”. Meanwhile, the Nazis effectively exploited the Rockefeller-developed-and-financed oil-from-coal process.

⁴ For example, ethanol, hydrogenation (oil from coal), solar power, wind power, wave power and water power continue to attract much interest. Then there is zero-point energy, which many scientists insist is real, notwithstanding the supposed disgracing of the Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann experiment in 1989 -on this, see, for example, Edmund Storms: “Review of the Cold Fusion effect”, Journal of Scientific Exploration, 1995.

⁵ A good place to start looking for these ideas is on Jay Hanson’s Dieoff Internet site.

⁶ An oil geologist who has worked for Texaco, British Petroleum and as an executive and a consultant for several other oil companies. He had earlier predicted oil would peak in 1989.

⁷ A former head of oil exploration for the French oil company Total

⁸ Colin Campbell and Jean Laherrere: “The End of Cheap Oil”, Scientific American, March, 1998

⁹ Interview with “From the Wilderness”, 2002

¹⁰ Ibid.

¹¹ Michael C. Lynch, Chief Energy Economist, DRI-WEFA, Inc.: “Closed Coffin: Ending the Debate on ‘The End of Cheap Oil,’ a commentary”. September 2001.

¹² An earlier copy of PetroConsultants’ (now IHS Energy’s) assessed reserves report was priced at $32,000 each -on condition that it was used “exclusively” by the purchaser -see Peter Odell, “A Guide to Oil Reserves and Resources”, circa 1997.

¹³ “If Union Bank was not the conduit for laundering the Rockefeller’s Nazi investments back to America, then how could the Rockefeller-controlled Chase Manhattan Bank end up owning 31% of the Thyssen group after the war? It should be noted that the Thyssen group (TBG) is now the largest industrial conglomerate in Germany, and with a net worth of more than $50 billion dollars, one of the wealthiest corporations in the world. TBG is so rich it even bought out the Krupp family, famous arms makers for Hitler, leaving the Thyssens as the undisputed champion survivors of the Third Reich. Where did the Thyssens get the start-up money to rebuild their empire with such speed after World War II?” (John Loftus, “Heir to the Holocaust”, 2003.)

¹⁴ John Loftus, ibid.

¹⁵ David Astor (deceased) was the original patron, Lady Sarah Astor is a co-founder and chairperson, her husband Richard a trustee; the organization is funded by the Astor Trust. Several people from the oil industry have sat on its board, including Mr. A.M.S. Bahktiari, Senior Analyst for the National Iranian Oil Company and Matthew Simmons, investment banker and Texas oilman who used to head President Bush’s Energy Committee.

¹⁶ Thomas Gold was a professor of astronomy at Harvard University. Among other studies, his 1999 book, “The Deep Hot Biosphere”, presents the view that life on Earth exists many miles below the surface, coincident with recent findings by a team from the UNAM, headed by Dr. Elva Escobar Briones, which appears to have discovered exactly this, as well as tar, crystallized methane, methane gas, oil and carbonate deposits (See: La Jornada, May 26, 2004).

¹⁷ “Fuel’s Paradise”, Wired magazine, July, 2000

¹⁸ See his Gas Resources Corporation pages on the Internet.

¹⁹ The following is based on Kenney’s “Introduction to Modern Russian Petroleum Science”.

²⁰ According to B.P. Tissot and D.H. Welte’s “Petroleum Formation and Occurrence”, 1978, less than 0.1% of such matter might be transformed into organic carbon.

²¹ “In Sweden I produced oil by the ton from 6 kilometers down. Eighty barrels we pumped, perfectly ordinary crude oil, entirely in non-sedimentary rock, in granite. It looked like perfectly good stuff” -Thomas Gold in “Fuel’s Paradise”, Wired magazine, July, 2000.

²² F. Shnyukov, V. A. Krayushkin, I. K. Karpov, V. G. Kutcherov and I. N. Plotnikova, “Dismissal of the Claims of a Biological Connection for Natural Petroleum”, originally published in the “Energía” in 2001.

²³ “Considerations about Recent Predictions of Impending Shortages of Petroleum Evaluated from the Perspective of Modern Petroleum Science”, by J. F. Kenney, Joint Institute of the Physics of the Earth, Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow; Gas Resources Corporation, Houston.

²⁴ “Cracks of the World: Global Strike-Slip Fault Systems and Giant Resource Accumulations”

²⁵ It is also worth noting that one of the most famous cases of exhausted oil fields refilling was reported from the Gulf of Mexico in the 1990s. This phenomenon has again suggested, this time to oceanographers among others, that oil’s origin is to be found well below the Earth’s crust and that the refilling is not due to oil seeping horizontally into the exhausted fields from new fields (see: Christopher Cooper, “Something mysterious is going on at Eugene Island 330”, The Wall Street Journal, April 16, 1999).

²⁶ In Britain, the Guardian newspaper (and on Sunday, the Observer) promotes the view of oil depletion; one of its contributors, George Monbiot, has an impressive record as an environmentalist, while the Astor family is historically connected with the Observer (see note 15, too). The Guardian does this uncritically, with no eye to balanced reporting. I have already mentioned Jay Hanson’s “Dieoff” site. Another one worth looking at which popularizes the view that petroleum is fast running out is Michael Ruppert’s “From the Wilderness” site. Both sites, it should be mentioned, claim a critical, leftist following.

²⁷ In the September/October, 1997, issue of “Foreign Affairs” entitled “A Geo-strategy for Asia”.