Thomas Gold's Deep Hot Biosphere and the Origin of Petroleum

Concerned about petroleum prices. Consider their history. What is known as the first "oil shock" occurred in October 1973, just after the start of the Yom Kippur War, when Persian Gulf states raised petroleum prices from $3 to $5 a barrel, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait cut production to pressure the United States and European countries to force Israel to withdraw from occupied territories, and then Saudi Arabia imposed a total embargo on export of oil to the United States and the Netherlands. In December, the Shah of Iran, who wanted more money for economic development, took advantage of the shortage to force prices up to nearly $11, and for many years petroleum prices never looked back. The effects, which are well remembered, were immediate: lines at gas stations for limited amounts of gasoline; a general inflation rate of more than 10 percent; and a recession through 1974 to 1975; followed by only a weak recovery and yet more severe inflation and recession when the second oil shock of 1979 to 1980, following the Iranian revolution, sent prices to $35 a barrel. At the same time, the continuing reduction of proved reserves in the United States and the failure to increase proved reserves anywhere raised fears that the exhaustion of petroleum was immanent, for by the late 1970s the world reserve/production ratio had dropped to as little as 26 years. Oil was about to run out, and soon.

In this condition of worldwide anxiety over petroleum, certainly the principal concern of the decade, an op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal on 8 June 1977 drew a good deal of attention, and its content appeared in numerous publications. The author was Thomas Gold, a physicist and astrophysicist at Cornell University, best known as the formulator and one of the principal advocates of steady-state cosmology, the theory that the universe has always been as it is and that its expansion, seen in the recession of galaxies, is compensated by a generation of matter in space in the form of hydrogen atoms. The estimates of petroleum reserves, Gold wrote, are mistaken, because they are based upon the erroneous theory that petroleum is a "fossil fuel" originating from earlier biological sources, animals and plants, at the surface of the earth and buried only in shallow reservoirs. The planets of the solar system have substantial amounts of carbon, in the form of limestone in the earth, carbon dioxide in the atmospheres of Venus and Mars, and hydrocarbons in the atmospheres of the large, gaseous outer planets and in solid form in meteorites, so that it appears that the original matter from which the planets formed was rich in hydrocarbons. Gold estimated the quantity of hydrocarbons that have seeped to the surface of the earth in its entire history at 1.7 3 10¹⁷ tons, a supply that would last 20 million years, compared to proved reserves at that time of 8.7 3 10¹⁰ tons, and it is possible that immense quantities remain at depths greater than are currently exploited; hence, if oil exploration and drilling techniques are changed to take advantage of deep reserves, the supply of petroleum may be far greater than any foreseeable utilization.

Gold has been writing on this subject for the last 20 years in both technical and popular articles and in a book called Power from the Earth, Deep Earth Gas--Energy for the Future, published by Dent in 1987. To judge from books on petroleum geology and geochemistry published in the same period, the effect of his ideas has been insignificant. But Gold is a very clever physicist, and what he writes, whether it turns out to be right or wrong, is worthy of careful attention. The book under review is his latest and most ambitious statement of his theory, and is directed to a general...