Steven Vincent Johnson wrote on 2-4-08: ``Additional material some Vorts may enjoy reading regarding our country's frantic catch-up attempts in the plug-in market, and alternative fuels.
See: http://www.kiplinger.com/businessresource/forecast/archive/Park_It_and_Plug_It_080201.html GM is betting on a breakthrough that will make ethanol as plentiful as gasoline by investing in Costaka Inc., a company that says it has perfected technologies that will enable it to make large quantities of cellulosic ethanol -- fuel produced from grasses and other plants as well as agricultural waste -- starting in 2011 for around $1 per gallon. "Making ethanol for $1 per gallon isn't just a game changer. It's a whole new ballgame," says David Cole, chairman of the Center for Automotive Research, an auto industry consultancy. E85 fuel that retails for even $2 per gallon will steeply undercut gasoline's price and significantly reduce U.S. oil consumption.'' ---------------- Hi All, The thought of $1/gallon ethanol adds urgency to the Oil Gang's imperative to protect its markets. The imminent precipitous decline in oil price because of the world oil glut raises the probabilty that Bush will attack the Iranian oil fields to reduce supply. It is absolutely essential that we get off oil now, no matter where it comes from, because sooner or later the Oil Gang is going to realize that there is no peak oil; and they will stop at nothing to maintain price and eliminate competition. Jack Smith ---------------- http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20080202/fob1.asp NEWS ARTICLE from Science News, 2-2-08, by Sid Perkins Vol. 173, No. 5, p. 67, [Inorganic Oil] ``The Lost City hydrothermal field, which sits on the side of an undersea mountain about 2,500 kilometers east of Bermuda, was discovered in December 2000 (SN: 7/14/01, p. 21). Unlike most hydrothermal vents, which crop up along midocean ridges where tectonic plates spread to form new seafloor, those of the Lost City lie about 15 km west of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge on ocean crust that's about 1.5 million years old. Accordingly, the chemistry of the fluids surging from the Lost City vents differs radically from that found at other hydrothermal sites, says Giora Proskurowski, a geochemist at Woods Hole (Mass.) Oceanographic Institution ... Lost City fluids ... contain small quantities of hydrocarbons such as methane, ethane, and butane. A number of clues suggests that those substances, whose natural production usually results from the long-term heating of sediment rich in organic matter, were actually produced by inorganic chemical reactions, Proskurowski says. First, the rocks beneath the Lost City don't contain large amounts of organic matter. Second, the hydrothermal fluids are rich in dissolved hydrogen but contain a much lower than normal concentration of dissolved carbon dioxide. This suggests that what are called Fischer-Tropsch inorganic chemical reactions, which convert carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, and hydrogen into hydrocarbons, generated the substances. Finally, the proportion of the carbon-13 isotope in the hydrocarbons found in the Lost City fluids drops as the size of the hydrocarbon molecule grows, a trend opposite that found in sediment-derived hydrocarbons but characteristic of those generated by inorganic reactions, Proskurowski and his colleagues report in the Feb. 1 Science. Although some types of microorganisms that inhabit the mineral chimneys in the Lost City may have generated a portion of the fluids' dissolved methane, none found there could have produced the ethane, butane, or other organic compounds in the vents' brew. Finding butane in the fluids is particularly important, because that hydrocarbon is a building block for some of the organic substances found in cell membranes, Proskurowski notes ... Robert M. Hazen, a geophysicist at the Carnegie Institution of Washington (D.C.), agrees: "This is an exciting finding ... that demonstrates there are so many ways to make hydrocarbons in an abiogenic setting." ...'' -------------- href=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_biogenic_petroleum_theory> >From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia ``Deep biogenic petroleum theory The deep biotic petroleum theory, similar to the abiogenic petroleum origin hypothesis, holds that not all petroleum deposits within the Earth's rocks can be explained purely according to the orthodox view of petroleum geology . This theory is strictly different from abiogenic oil in that the role of deep-dwelling microbes is a biological source for oil which is not of a sedimentary origin and is not sourced from surface carbon ... Deep microbes Microbial life has been discovered 4.2 kilometers deep in Alaska and 5.2 kilometers deep in Sweden.[citation needed] Methanophile organisms have been known for some time, and recently it was found that microbial life in Yellowstone National Park is based on hydrogen metabolism. Other deep and hot extremophile organisms continue to be discovered. ---------------------- http://www.searchanddiscovery.net/documents/abstracts/2005research_calgary/abstracts/extended/hunt/hunt.htm> Hydrides and Anhydrides by C. Warren Hunt, 1119 Sydenham Road SW, CALGARY, ALBERTA, CANADA T2T 0T5, Tel. (403)-244-3341, Fax (403) 244-2834, E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ``Hydrogen being 90% or more of all matter in the Universe, must have been abundantly present in the formation of the early earth. The consensus among scientists has been that most primordial hydrogen was expelled as the earth accreted. New evidence challenges the consensus raises questions as to the validity of other long-held geological concepts. The new evidence involves the behavior of hydrogen nucleii, which at pressures characteristic of mantle depths have shed their electrons and inject themselves inside the first electron rings of metal atoms. Thus sequestered within the earth, hydrogen may comprise as much as 30-40 percent of total earth mass today. Hydrogen penetration into metals was demonstrated by Vladimir N. Larin, a geologist, whose project over the last 34 years has been research in the USSR and FSU on sources of natural hydrogen. Three major effects result from the phenomenon: (1) transmutation, (2) densification, and (3) fluidization ... >From this data it is easily shown that the excess core and mantle density above that of the crust can be attributed to injected hydrogen, and the density differences between inner core, outer core, and lower mantle can be treated as phase effects. In this scenario the idea of an iron core is superfluous. V.N. Larin demonstrated the fluidity of titanium hydride for this writer by setting a ruby in plasticized titanium intermetal. Under reduced pressure the hydrogen bled off, allowing the metal to recrystallize and leave the ruby set firmly in metallic titanium. The potassium and titanium behaviors are not unique. All elements but noble gases form hydrides ... The hydrides of silicon, the silanes (SiH4, Si2H6, Si3H8, Si4H10, etc.) are of special interest. Gases at standard conditions, they react vigorously with water, producing quartz, volcanic ash, and rock-forming minerals, depending on depth, pressure and the admixture of other metal hydrides. The high mobility of silane explains the mode of transfer of silicon from the interior to the oxidic crust. Crust then is the residue after silane and intermetal oxidation and release of hydrogen, which eventually escapes into space. Carbon ... probably is prominent in the form of carbides in the interior. Its primary hydride form, methane (CH4), although energy-laden like silane, behaves quite differently in three important contrasting ways. First, it does not react with water; second, its combustion products are only gases; and third, it enables the biosphere. Where silane is stalled in the crust by reacting with water, methane and hydrogen released by its partial oxidation proceed upward in fracture pathways. Methane and hydrogen seep into deep, shield mines and through porous members of sedimentary series. Both are major constituents of fluid inclusions in sub-oceanic basalts as well as in shield granites. Their migration is differentially impeded due to their different molecular sizes. Methane may be trapped temporarily, while hydrogen escapes. Both enter the atmosphere worldwide on a large scale. Thus the hydridic earth image comprises a mobile inner geosphere of highly-reduced, dense, intermetals and carbides, an outer geosphere of oxidic rock that has accumulated incrementally through geological time, and a transient liquid-gas envelope. The image implies a core that is neither iron nor very hot, because the heat source for endogeny is primarily not primordial heat but the chemical energy released in the upper mantle and lower crust, near the crust-mantle boundary by hydride oxidation. Hydrocarbons other than methane are partially oxidized carbon forms, and thus unlikely to occur in any form but methane in the earth's interior where extreme reducing conditions prevail. When methane rises to outer crust levels from the interior, its chemical energy is available to metabolize bacteria and archaea that live there in total darkness at elevated temperatures. They get that energy by stripping hydrogen from the methane and oxidizing it metabolically. When bacteria and archaea strip hydrogen from methane, they create 'anhydrides' of methane, CH3, CH2, etc. Two CH3s combine to make C2H6, ethane; two CH3s and one CH2 make C3H8, propane, etc. The process is known on the surface, where outcrops of petroliferous strata sometimes are sealed by bacterially produced tar seals behind which live oil has accumulated. In this case, bacteria have stripped hydrogen from live oil, rendering it immobile. Anhydride theory merely extrapolates the process backward to explain stripping of methane, the lowest carbon numbered hydrocarbon. Petroleum can be interpreted as degenerated methane, a product of the biosphere. Petroleum produced by bacterial stripping of methane is, a mixture of anhydrides of methane, an organic product produced from inorganic methane. Coal and oil shales are also anhydride products. In peat and kerogen-rich shales, partially oxidized carbon is present that has lost electrons and thus carries positive charges. By contrast, the carbon in methane that effuses from the highly reduced earth interior has acquired electrons and is negatively charged. Opposite charges cause capture of effusing methane by peat and kerogen ... The terminal anhydride, pure carbon, the main component of the purest coals and asphaltites, and protein molecules (porphyrins and others) that are found in petroleum and coal are molecular residues of organic origin. The fact that coal and oil shales have more carbon and hydrogen than their peat and fossil predecessors is clear evidence that fossils cannot fully explain their origins. These high carbon and hydrogen contents of oil shales and coals require abiogenic additions, whereas organic molecules require organic provenance. Methane and petroleum found in coal seams and organic shales should be seen as evidence of methane capture, not methane generation. The topology of petroleum occurrence is a further defeat for the argument in favour of either an exclusively organic or exclusively abiogenic origin for petroleum. If oil were either rising from primordial sources in the earth's interior or created in 'oil windows' by catagenesis, the more mobile fractions would escape from the depths and be found more abundantly near the surface and less mobile fractions, low gravity oils, would be present at depth. Exactly the opposite is the norm. Methane gas, the most mobile hydrocarbon, is more abundant with depth, worldwide; and tars, the least mobile, are most abundant at and near the surface ... Working backwards through the above points, we can say that: Topologies of hydrocarbon occurrences indicate that methane effuses from the interior, not petroleum; ... and that the discovery that hydrogen nuclei under pressure penetrate atomic shells of metals, transmuting the metals to intermetals, densifying them, and fluidizing them, creates an entirely new geological picture of the earth's interior, of endogeny, and of the mode by which the crust was created [and also of the almost infinite supply of petroleum and methane waiting to be found.] '' ------------- http://www.engdahl.oilgeopolitics.net/Geopolitics___Eurasia/Peak_Oil___Russia/peak_oil___russia.html ARTICLE By F William Engdahl, September 14, 2007 ``... The 2003 arrest of Russian Mikhail Khodorkovsky, of Yukos Oil, took place just before he could sell a dominant stake in Yukos to ExxonMobil after a private meeting with Dick Cheney. Had Exxon got the stake they would have control of the world's largest resource of geologists and engineers trained in the abiotic techniques of deep drilling ... Why then the high-risk war to control Iraq? For a century US and allied Western oil giants have controlled world oil via control of Saudi Arabia or Kuwait or Nigeria. Today, as many giant fields are declining, the companies see the state-controlled oilfields of Iraq and Iran as the largest remaining base of cheap, easy oil ... Perhaps in some decades Western geologists will rethink their mythology of fossil origins and realize what the Russians have known since the 1950's. In the meantime Moscow holds a massive energy trump card.'' ------------- http://www.engdahl.oilgeopolitics.net/Geopolitics___Eurasia/Pricing_the_Risk/pricing_the_risk.html ARTICLE by F. William Engdahl, 28 January 2006 ``... The possibility of war against Iran presents a geo-strategic and geopolitical problem of far more complexity than did the bombing and occupation of Iraq. And Iraq has proven complicated enough for the United States. Below we try to identify some of the main motives of the main actors in the new drama and the outlook for possible war. The dramatis personae include the Bush Administration, most especially the Cheney-led neo-conservative hawks in control now of not only the Pentagon, but also the CIA, the UN Ambassadorship and a growing part of the State Department planning bureaucracy under Condi Rice ...'' Jack writes: ``To get some idea of what the CIA is doing, see http://www.amazon.com/ for "Crossing the Rubicon: The Decline of the American Empire at the End of the Age of Oil," by Michael C. Ruppert; On the web see http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/index.shtml Ruppert understands the mentality of the CIA because he shares the CIA belief in 'peak oil' -- Quoting from p. 49 of "Crossing the Rubicon": "... the Agency was already well aware of Peak Oil in the mid 1970's. [The 1975 film] "Three Days of The Condor" ... said then what few in the post-9/11 world would have the courage to say now: Turner (Robert Redford): Do we have plans to invade the Middle East? Higgins (Cliff Robertson): Are you crazy? ... Turner: Do we have plans? ... Higgins: What do you think people are gonna want us to do then? Turner: Ask them. Higgins: Not now -- then. Ask them when they're running out ... They won't want us to ask them. They'll just want us to get it for them."
