Jennifer Marohasy

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Who’s “Utterly Wrong” on The Murray?

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In the December 2004 issue of Quadrant magazine I had an article published entitled ‘Why Save the Murray’. It began:

“I WAS SURPRISED when I learned that the Australian [newspaper] was running a “Saving the Murray” campaign. I realised that journalists often fail in their quest for the truth, but I assumed that they at least subscribed to the ideal. Campaigning – organised action to achieve a particular end – is the antithesis of honest reporting.

Environmentalism is now big business and big politics. It would therefore seem important that journalists at our national daily newspaper scrutinise the actions and the media releases from politicians, environmental activists and the growing industry and research lobby, particularly on an issue as important as the Murray River. Yet they were running a campaign.”

In the piece I went on to document the campaign, and how much of what the newspaper writes on the River is propaganda rather than news or considered opinion.

I knew it was a bad career move, so to speak, taking on the nation’s daily newspaper. But gee their editorial today, entitled ‘Weighing up Water‘ is a bit mean:

“IN 2001, The Australian launched a campaign to save the ailing Murray River. In daily reports during a 2200km journey along the nation’s mightiest waterway from Albury to its mouth at the Coorong, this newspaper’s Amanda Hodge catalogued its precarious plight as a result of salination, over-irrigation, and pollution…
The Australian’s Murray campaign was challenged by the conservative Institute of Public Affairs, which released a report showing the river’s condition had not deteriorated in 15 years. They were utterly wrong. Five years after Hodge’s journey and faced with the looming reality that the present drought may see the Murray run dry, John Howard and the premiers of the four southeastern states have finally agreed on a plan to overhaul the nation’s water management by fast-tracking both a system of interstate trading of water entitlements and water conservation projects.”

No. My report ‘ Myth and the Murray: Measuring the Real State of the River Environment’ was factually correct. Furthermore, it didn’t show “no deterioration”. It actually documented improvement!

In the report I also explained that while it is generally believed that irrigation diversions leave too little water in the river. In reality, as a consequence of the building of dams and weirs, the water level in the river is unnaturally high for much of the length of the river, most of the time.

Now in 2006 with record low inflows into the Murray, there is much hand wringing because the river might run dry. If this happens, the consequences will be devastating for many industries. But it won’t necessarily be devastating for the ecology of the river. Australian rivers naturally run dry during drought. What is most unnatural is to continue to push large quantities of water downstream during drought.

We’ll see if the Australian publishes the letter to the editor which I’ve just drafted and sent off now.

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Update 10th November, 2006

My letter was published today in The Australian and is available online:

Facts, not exaggeration

YOUR editorial (“Weighing up water”, 9/11) claims that a report by the Institute of Public Affairs was “utterly wrong” to conclude that the condition of the Murray River had not deteriorated in 15 years. Actually, all the evidence does support the IPA’s findings.

Our 2003 report showed that salt levels had halved at key sites, Murray cod and sliver perch numbers were on the increase and that while there were many stressed red gums in South Australia, forests in NSW and Victoria were generally healthy and supported large populations of water birds.

The report also explained that it’s generally believed that irrigation diversions leave too little water in the river. In reality, as a consequence of the building of dams and weirs, the water level in the river was unnaturally high for much of the length of the river, most of the time.

Now, in 2006, with record low inflows into the Murray, there is much hand-wringing because the river might run dry. If this happens, the consequences will be devastating for many industries. But it won’t necessarily be devastating for the ecology of the river. Australian rivers naturally run dry during drought. What is most unnatural is to continue to push large quantities of water downstream during drought.

Sensible water policy needs to be based on facts, not exaggeration.

Dr Jennifer Marohasy
Senior fellow, Institute of Public Affairs
Melbourne

Mine Your Own Business, But Don’t Miss the Movie

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MYOB_header.gif

Mine Your Own Business is a powerful film about the hopes of people living in poverty and about misguided environmentalism.

Directed by former Financial Times journalist Phelim McAleer, Mine Your Own Business exposes the motivations of those attempting to stop economic development in the name of the environment.

The Institute of Public Affairs will be screening Mine Your Own Business at the following locations

Melbourne, 20 November 2006
Arthur Streeton Auditorium, Sofitel Melbourne, 25 Collins Street.

Hobart, 21 November 2006
Old Woolstore Theatrette, 1 Macquarie Street.

Sydney, 22 November 2006
Dendy Opera Quays, Shop 9, 2 East Circular Quay.

Perth, 23 November 2006
Cinema Paradiso, 164 James St, Northbridge.

Screenings at all venues begin at 6pm. The film will be followed by a discussion with Phelim McAleer and Ann McElhinney. $10 donations welcome. Payment can be made at the door.

To register contact Georgina Hamilton on 03 9600 4744 or ghamilton@ipa.org.au

For more information on the film click here: http://www.mineyourownbusiness.org/index.htm
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Update 10th November

Following comments (see below) quering the motivations of Phelim McAleer in making the movie I’m updating this blog post with profiles of the films directors and producers:

Ann McElhinney

Ann McElhinney is a Fellow of the Moving Picture Institute, a not for profit dedicated to advancing liberty through the medium of film (thempi.org). She is also is a journalist, broadcaster and producer and joint managing director of New Bera Media, an independent documentary production company.

Ann McElhinney directed and produced “Mine Your Own Business” (2006).She is a co-producer and presenter of “The Search for Tristan’s Mum” (2005) an hour long documentary for RTE. The documentary
featured the case of Tristan Dowse, who was adopted by an Irish couple at birth and then abandoned in an Indonesian orphanage two years later. Tristan’s plight provoked a wave of sympathy and outrage in Ireland and “The Search for Tristan’s Mum” followed journalist Ann McElhinney in a search to find his natural mother in Indonesia.

As a result of McElhinney’s undercover investigations into Tristan’s case where she posed as a woman hoping to adopt she revealed an illegal baby selling ring. Further investigations by the Indonesian police saw the leaders
of the ring sentenced to nine and eight years in prison.

“The Search for Tristan’s Mum” was selected by fellow industry professionals from across the globe and showcased at Input 2006 in Taiwan in May 2006.

McElhinney was an Assistant Producer on the BBC Spotlight documentary “Romanian Twins” (2004) and featured
in CBC’s “Return to Sender” (2005) as the investigative reporter who discovered the story of Alexandra
Austin. McElhinney also worked with CBC as an associate producer and researcher on “Return to Sender”. Previously McElhinney worked as a journalist with the BBC, Irish Times, RTE, Sunday Times and Sunday Tribune.

She has regularly contributed reports and analysis for RTE’s Six One News, Morning Ireland and World Report and has been a regular contributor to Orla Barry’s show on Newstalk 106 and Today FM’s The Last Word show.

Phelim McAleer

Phelim McAleer is a Fellow of the Moving Picture Institute, a New York-based non-profit that identifies
and nurtures promising filmmakers who are committed to protecting and sustaining a free and prosperous society (www.thempi.org). He is also the joint managing director of New Bera Media, an independent documentary production company. McAleer directed, produced and wrote “Mine Your Own Business” (2006) the world’s first anti-environmentalist documentary. The documentary hacks away at the cozy image of environmentalists as well-meaning, harmless activists. He was also an Associate

Producer, second unit director and researcher on the documentary “Return to Sender” which aired on Canada’s CBC in February 2005.

From 2000 to 2003 he was the Romania/Bulgaria Correspondent for the Financial Times. He has also written for The Economist from the region. Previously from 1998 to 2000, he worked for the UK Sunday Times in their Dublin office.

McAleer started his career as a journalist working for a local newspaper in Crossmaglen, Co. Armagh known as Bandit country for the ferocity of the IRA campaign in the area. He then moved to the Irish News in Belfast. At the Irish News, Northern Ireland’s largest selling daily newspaper worked as a journalist covering the Northern Ireland troubles and peace process before becoming night editor.

He devised and co-produced “The Search for Tristan’s Mum” which was broadcast on RTE 1, the Irish State television station, in 2005. It featured the case of Tristan Dowse, who was adopted by an Irish couple at birth and then abandoned in an Indonesian orphanage two years later.

The Search for Tristan’s Mum was selected for and shown at Input 2006, a showcase for the best programs
from national public broadcasters from around the world, the programs was selected by fellow industry professionals and showcased at Input 2006 in Taiwan in May.

He has been a regular contributor to RTE and BBC radio and television.

Coffee Cats & Clouded Leopards

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I was fascinated to read last Friday in the Courier-Mail that the Herveys Range Heritage Tea Rooms in North Queensland have started selling $50 a cup Kopi Luwak coffee.

The coffee is expensive because the coffee beans are retrieved from the poo of the luwak, or common palm civet, Paradoxurus hermaphroditus. These cat-like creatures are apparently found in the jungles of Sumatra, Java and Sulawesi in Indonesia.

The luwak eat ripe coffee berries but the inner bean is not digested, and can be retrieved from the animal’s poo while the stomach enzymes add to the coffee’s flavor.

I gave up drinking coffee when I gave up smoking cigarettes about 18 years ago, so I will probably never know whether this poo brew is worth the effort and expense. But I thought it was a great potential example of conservation through sustainable use as promoted by Michael Archer at the AEF conference.

I was a bit keen to see more pictures of coffee cats in the wild and get a picture for this blog, so I emailed Richard Ness in the hope he might have some photographs from the many camera traps he has had set in Indonesian jungle. [Remember that magnificent picture of the Sumatran tiger.]

Anyway instead of a Kopi Luwak, he has sent me this magnificent picture of a Macan dahan or clouded leopard, Neofelis nebulosa.

macan dahan, blog.JPG

While the coffee cats are apparently quite common, this species, like the Sumatran tiger, is threatened by hunting for body parts including for meat, fur, teeth as well as bones.

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Thanks Richard Ness for the great photograph of the clouded leopard. If you have a picture of an endangered animal that you would like to share with other readers of this blog, please send it to jennifermarohasy@jennifermarohasy.com .

Key Outcomes: Summit on the Southern Murray Darling Basin

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The Commonwealth and Governments of New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia and Queensland agreed or noted at this morning’s water summit on the Southern Murray Darling Basin (MDB):

1. The need for a shared understanding of the likely water availability over the next year and a half.

2. The need for an informed whole of Basin approach to be developed collaboratively, not by jurisdictions acting without regard to the consequences for other States.

3. Establish a group of high-level officials drawn from First Ministers’ Departments and the MDB Commission to examine contingency planning to secure urban and town supplies during 2007-08. This group will report to First Ministers by 15 December 2006.

4. Accelerate the implementation of key aspects of the NWI, especially on water trading, overallocation, water accounting and data sharing. Ensure that permanent interstate trading will commence in the southern MDB States by 1 January 2007 as recommended by the National Water Commission. New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia and Queensland also agreed in substance to accept the advice from the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission on exit fees.

5. Not intervene in Snowy Hydro Ltd commercial arrangements this year.

6. Commission the CSIRO to report progressively by the end of 2007 on sustainable yields of surface and groundwater systems within the MDB, including an examination of assumptions about sustainable yield in light of changes in climate and other issues.

7. The Commonwealth will process speedily its response to major projects under the Australian Government Water Fund.

8. The Commonwealth indicated it was providing over $2.3 billion for a wide range of drought assistance in EC-affected areas, and announced a new initiative (costing approximately $210 million over two years) to extend income support and interest rate subsidies to the owners of small businesses that receive 70 per cent of their income from farm businesses.

9. The States have agreed to pay 10 per cent of interest costs under the Commonwealth’s small business announcement. The States have also agreed to consider a Commonwealth proposal that they follow the lead of Victoria in providing a 50 per cent rebate for municipal and shire rates to eligible recipients, and also to waive or rebate water charges (or equivalents thereof) in EC declared areas where water allocations have been substantially reduced.

10. It has already been agreed that water and climate change would be items for consideration at the next COAG meeting.

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I wrote a blog piece earlier today entitled ‘Murray River: Last Year Biggest Environmental Flow, This Year Water Crisis’ on the water shortage issue.

Murray River: Last Year Biggest Environmental Flow, This Year Water Crisis

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The Prime Minister, John Howard, has called a summit to discuss the water crisis in the Murray-Darling Basin.

The meeting, being held as I write this blog, was apparently triggered by the NSW government decision to suspend water trading on the Murray and Murrumbidgee rivers and the low state of the dams in New South Wales and Victoria.

According to Parliamentary Secretary to the Prime Minister, Malcolm Turnbull, the big dams on the river will be just about empty by Autumn if it doesn’t rain.

Leader of the Australian Greens Bob Brown is claiming there has been a problem for years, the government has done nothing, and “seventy per cent of the river red gums along the Murray are either dead or dying.”

There are a few dead red gums along the Murray. But anyone who lives along the river, regularly visits the river, or saw the recent ABC series ‘Two Men in a Tinnie’ would know most of the river red gums along both the Darling and Murray Rivers are very much alive. Another huge porkie from Mr Brown! Another piece of misleading, probably originally from the MDBC.

What seems to have been forgotten in all the recent hand wringing is that just last October the NSW and Victorian governments – the same governments who this year are complaining their dams are empty – made the world’s largest delivery of environmental water letting the equivalent of a Sydney Harbor of water flood the Barmah-Millewa red gum forest which straddles the Murray River upstream of Echuca.

According to a Victorian government report on water operations: “The joint release saw 513 gigalitres of water delivered to the forest and the inundation of over half of the forest floodplain, resulting in greatly improved condition for wetland vegetation and breeding activity for key wetland fauna. Wetland vegetation, including moira grass and the threatened wavy marshwort, responded with significantly improved condition and the flooding waters provided for new growth and canopy regeneration in stressed river red gums. The release also triggered large reproductive events in important native fish species such as golden perch and the threatened silver perch as well as in many water bird species, including the great egret, darters, spoonbills, grebes, ibis and cormorants, and the critically endangered intermediate egret.”

All this during one of the worst droughts on record!

Then there is the water being sucked up from regrowth following the January 2003 bushfires in the upper catchment, new plantations, groundwater licences being activated by farmers who can now trade that water, improved on-farm water use efficiency and recycling some of this in place because of a past fear of rising groundwater tables*, water being evaporated by the Murray Darling Basin Commission’s salt interception schemes and low rainfall …and it is not that surprising that the region has a chronic water shortage.

But rather than do a proper water audit and work out the relative contribution of these factors which have probably all contributed to the current problem, governments and many key commentators keep blaming climate change. Yet the rainfall record for the MDB doesn’t show an abnormal decline.**

BOM to 2005 rainfall.JPG
Rainfall record for the Murray Darling Basin from 1900 to the end of 2005.

South Australian Premier Mike Rann said he would use today’s summit to ensure water reached the bottom of the Murray-Darling basin. Yeah, many South Australians see the river as nothing more than an channel for getting water from the Hume and Dartmouth dams to Adelaide and their wine grape growers.

But sorry Mr Rann, noone can ensure that their will be water for South Australia if the dams run dry.

In advance of the summit, the National Farmers Federation Executive Director, Ben Fargher, put out a media release saying, “As a first priority, we need to ensure that towns which support regional communities have certainty over water supply. “There must also be a clear strategy to effectively manage core breeding stock, permanent plantings and other production issues in order to protect Australia’s agricultural base through this unprecedented drought.”

But that’s also impossible Mr Fargher if there is no water.

If the Murray runs dry next year it would be devastating for farmers and rural communities that draw their water from the river, but it would not be a disaster for the environment. Australian rivers run dry. Water levels in the Murray River have been artificially high so far this drought, because of the dams and weirs.

Dry Murray 1914 blog3.JPG
The Murray River at Riversdale in 1914.

Riversdale_P1000053 blog 2.JPG
The Murray River at Riversdale early this year.

Here’s some really ridiculous commentary from an article in last week’s The Age to illustrate the extent to which our politicians and environmentalists seem to not really care or understand the issue. They don’t seem to understand that if you don’t have any water, there will be none to save, and none for the environment. The article follows an announcement by Mr Turnbull inviting farmers and irrigators to participate in an “excess water scheme”.

“The scheme will provide an incentive for those with water entitlements in the southern Murray-Darling Basin to cut their water use.

Farmers could switch from flood-irrigating an orchard to using water drippers, for example, and sell the water they saved from their entitlements to the Federal Government.

… Peter Cosier, from the Wentworth Group of Concerned Scientists, slammed the tender, claiming it was “too complex” and “too bureaucratic”.

Mr Cosier said Australia was “way behind” its target to return 500 billion litres to the Murray River by 2009. “We don’t have time to muck around with inefficient grant schemes because they are not delivering water for the environment.”

… Opposition environment spokesman Anthony Albanese said that while Labor supported buying water, the Murray needed water now, not in 2009.

… Meanwhile, the Murray-Darling Water Crisis Management Council warned that the Hume Dam – a source of water to many towns and now at only 11 per cent capacity – would run dry in 24 weeks unless all environmental flows down the Murray were suspended.”

No Mr Albanese, the river doesn’t need water now, it’s all the industries that have grown up along the river that need water now. Without the dams and weirs built for these same industries the river would have already run dry.

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* I explain how past policies driven by a fear of rising groundwater and spreading salinity may have artificially dehydrated the landscape in a piece I recently wrote for OLO: http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=5076 .

** I have recently explained that blaming the current drought on climate change is indeed drawing a long bow in a piece for the Courier Mail: http://www.news.com.au/couriermail/story/0,23739,20678328-27197,00.html

Abiotic Oil: A Note from Louis Hissink

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“There is a widely held belief that coal and oil are the result of a conversion from organic matter, both vegetable and biotic, that accumulated in sedimentary basins over geological time to become fossil fuels. It is presumed that vast periods of geological time converted the raw buried organic material into petroleum at the base of the sedimentary piles in the earth’s crust. An alternative theory proposes that coal and oil are abiotic in origin and derived from upper mantle processes as suggested by the modern Russian-Ukrainian theory of abiotic oil, but also popularised by the late Tommy Gold in his controversial book, ‘The Deep Hot Biosphere’.*

In this guest blog post Louis Hissink explains the alternative theory, but begins by explaining how the current consensus came to be …

“Modern geological thinking remains wedded to its uniformitarian paradigm set up during the early nineteenth century when Charles Lyell, a Whig lawyer and amateur geologist, wrote his ‘Principles of Geology’ as a political work to refute the authority of the ruling Tories in England.

Rather than refute his critics facts with evidence, Lyell used his skills as a lawyer to convert his opponents by the art of persuasion, and his ‘Principles of Geology’ the main weapon.

Until then, geology was limited by the constraints of the Christian bible. There was a belief in one original catastrophe, the Noachian flood, which occurred during the recent geological past.

George Grinnell in his paper ‘The Origins of Modern Geological Theory’ describes the political circumstances that prompted the adoption of Lyellian doctrine or uniformitarianism that dominates modern geology thinking to this day.

Lyell’s Principles allowed the clerical geologists of his day to have their cake but also to eat it.

What Lyell did was to shift Biblical creation from its Ussherian date of 4004 BC to some more distant time by interposing an arbitrary period of geological time during which miracles could be invoked to explain geological observations under the principle that anything becomes possible if enough time is allocated. Lyell also dismissed the Old Testament as literature rather than a badly interpreted historical account of the Jewish Peoples and finally banished biblical catastrophism from the nascent science of geology.

When Lyell went to North America he visited the famous Horseshoe Falls (Niagara Falls) and asked a native at what rate the falls were receding. The native American answered that the rate was some 3 -4 feet per year. Lyell, however, assumed that as natives of a country tend to exaggerate their country’s facts then the quoted rate was too high and arbitrarily reduced it to 1 foot per year, subsequently establishing the date of the last ice-age at some 10,000 years past.

Is this relevant to abiotic oil? Yes because it demonstrates how the empirically obvious is changed by persuasive argument. Much of geology relies on the Lyellian system of persuasian and biogenic oil theory is no exception.

The paramount axiom in geology is that the key to the past is the present. Which means that what we observe, and have observed, of natural forces operating on the surface of the planet, in a geological sense, must explain the past. If the key to the past is indeed the present, then somewhere on the surface of the earth there must exist modern day precursors of the ancient coal seams and petroleum deposits — accumulations of vegetable and organic masses in sedimentary basins, pre-fossil deposits as it were — to produce tomorrow’s coal and oil.

It is generally assumed that the Pacific Ocean is of Jurassic age but no widespread accumulations of organic detritus have been found on the seafloor or in its thin sedimentary cover, and equally so for the other seas over the earth. Nor are there any enormous ever increasing accumulations of organic material on the land surfaces comprising dead animals or forests. Of course a minor amount of organic detritus does accumulate in the existing sediments today, but not at sufficient quantities to allow the interpretation that one day in the future oil will be produced from them. How could so much oil be produced from so few organisms?

But it is an irrefutable fact that the earth’s biosphere is continually recycling itself, whether via the plant or animal kingdoms and nowhere are deposits of organic material that could be the future coal and oil deposits forming. If petroleum is truly biotic, then enormous masses of organic material must be accumulating somewhere on the earth’s surface to form future oils. Why don’t we see them? Could the biogenic oil theory be wrong?

In the geological record the past mass extinctions of the biosphere of both plant an animal, are preserved with amazing fidelity in the sedimentary strata except that there are no coal and oil deposits associated with these fossils.

Strange, fossils that are not oil.

Of course coal has abundant plant remnants in it but as Tommy Gold pointed out, if coal is the result of compressing hundreds of meters of vegetation debris, then we certainly should not see undeformed tree trunks passing through the coal seams.

Unfortunately Christian fundamentalists have produced most of the scientific evidence for this, guaranteeing it will not be considered as “scientific” evidence. It is not so much the evidence as the interpretation of that evidence which is problematical.

This is a serious problem for the fossil fuel theory – just how are these enormous deposits of petroleum formed from organic material, given that we are not observing any modern day accumulation of organic material. (That minor plankton debris in sediments is capable of accumulation in the sedimentary basins requires a serious stretch of the imagination to produce the trillions of barrels of oil so far discovered). Does this then mean that it occurred in the geological past but not during the present? This is a violation of the key geological paradigm – that the present can explain the past.

Just how much oil do we have?

According to the US Geological Survey, “the earth currently has more than three trillion barrels of conventional, recoverable oil resources of which 1 trillion has already been produced” according to Mark Nolan, chairman of ExxonMobil addressing the Asia Pacific Oil and Gas Conference in Sydney during September 2006.

Now how much organic material has had to accumulate over geological time to yield these enormous oil reserves. It means living organisms being continuously created on the surface of the earth but then removed from their environment to form deposits of organic matter in ancient sediments where they can be preserved. We do not observe this occurring today so how could we assume that it happened in the past?

Furthermore, surely there must also be ancient deposits of organic material not yet converted to oil in the stratigraphical record too, but no, no such deposits have been discovered. And in any case how are fossils formed in the first place? Again we do not see them forming today. Animals die, decompose and are recycled into the biosphere.

However, in order to form a fossil, all biological processes have to cease to allow preservation. If putrefaction is allowed to proceed, the animal rots and disintegrates back into its environment. The quickest way to form a fossil from a living animal is to take it rapidly away from its normal environment and place it in an alien one so a snake in a tropical rainforest will be rapidly fossilised if quickly placed in the Antarctic.

So how does one accumulate tens of trillions of tonnes of organic matter in sediments without putrefaction or recycling in the biosphere to form the vast deposits that are then transformed into petroleum.

The only reason petroleum is called a fossil fuel is because it contains organic debris but it is quite obvious that if petroleum is abiotic and derived from the mantle, then as an excellent solvent of organic material, up-welling hydrocarbons will naturally incorporate the organic debris found in sedimentary rocks.

Another argument is that no oil has been found in the crystalline basement regions of the earth. Hardly surprising when the majority of petroleum geologists believe in biogenic oil and thus only look for it in sedimentary rocks. They have not found oil in granite simply because they have not drilled granite for oil on the basis of preconceived ideas that it is not possible. Unfortunately for the fossil fuelers petroleum is being found and commercially extracted in fractured granite basement off Vietnam.

According to this website: “ Since its foundation VIETSOVPETRO has drilled over 140 thousand meters of exploration and 800 thousand meters of production wells. As a result of this seven oil fields were discovered, the largest are White Tiger, Dragon and Dai Hung that are already operated by the Joint Venture. White Tiger is so far the largest oil field on the continental shelf of Vietnam. Main reserve of this oil field is concentrated in fractured granite basement that is unique in the world oil and gas production practice”.

Robert O. Russell, a wellsite geologist who drilled into crystalline basement granitic shield rocks for the express purpose of commercial hydrocarbon exploration at Fort McMurray, Alberta, Canada, has pointed out that there are more than 400 wells and fields worldwide, both off-shore and on-shore that produce or have recently produced oil from igneous rocks.

This fact alone indicates that many aspects relating to the origin of petroleum need to be revised.

Thomas Gold, a distinguished proponent of the non-organic theory, has expanded the application of the non-organic theory to all hydrocarbons, including coal.

An international conference on ‘Oil in Granite’ was held recently in Kazan, Tatarstan, Russia. One of the papers by Kosachev et al. from the Institute of Organic Physics and Chemistry, Russian Academy of Sciences, Kazan, concluded that much evidence existed in favour of the non-organic theory, and that viable mechanisms for the creation of migration pathways existed.

Recently, C. Warren Hunt, a geologist of the Anhydride Oil Corporation, Calgary, Canada, has proposed a variant of the non-organic theory. Hunt sets forth the notion that up-welling deep non-organic methane is bacterially modified into petroleum at shallow depths.

There is one other difficulty with the fossil-fuel theory, the violation of the second law of thermodynamics. The only hydrocarbon that can be created at the pressures and depths of the sedimentary basins is methane. Yet by the use of vast amounts of geological time, modern geology asserts that somehow vast quantities of organic debris, not observed accumulating anywhere, is converted to high order hydrocarbons by undefined processes. Saudi Crude, for example, which is essentially grease.

In summary, petroleum, or rock-oil, is not derived from the burial of organic debris in sedimentary basins. It is continually produced from the earth’s mantle as described by the modern Russian-Ukrainian theory of abiotic oil. It is emphatically not a fossil fuel derived from dead dinosaurs and fish and no one has yet been able to generate petroleum (apart from methane) from organic matter at the temperatures and pressures at the base of sedimentary basins.“

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* A full account of the Abiotic oil theory is presented at http://www.gasresources.net. C. Warren-Hunt has offered another origin for petroleum at http://www.polarpublishing.com/ .

Thanks Louis.