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Volume 05.01Petroleum Products and Lubricants (I): D 56 - D 3348 (1,614 pages, 230 standards, 2008 edition) ... Read more

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High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! Low-carbon fuel standard (LCFS) is a rule enacted to reduce carbon intensity in transportation fuels as compared to conventional petroleum fuels, such as gasoline and diesel. The most common low-carbon fuels are alternative fuels and cleaner fossil fuels purpose of a low-carbon fuel standard is to decrease carbon dioxide emissions associated to fuel-powered vehicles considering the entire life cycle ("well to wheels"), in order to reduce the carbon footprint of transportation The first low-carbon fuel standard mandate in the world was enacted by California in 2007, with specific eligibility criteria defined by the California Air Resources Board (CARB) in April 2009 but taking effect until January 2011.Similar legislation was approved in British Columbia in April 2008, and by European Union in December 2008.Several bills have been proposed in the United States for such regulation at a national level but with less stringent standards than California.The United Kingdom is implementing its Renewable Transport Fuel Obligation Program, which also applies the concept of low-carbon fuels. ... Read more

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Customer Reviews (12)

Dissappointed
I can only say that I was a bit dissappointed with the depth of material in the book. I feel I could find far more relevant info on the web. It's a great subject that deserved a deeper probing IMHO.

OK
Even though I believe that this book is on an important subject, I thought that the material was overly brief and only stated what others have said without proof. Seemed really short on background facts and technical reasoning.

Very informative!
One good thing about this book is that the author does not need 300 pages to explain the Oil/Agriculture relation. What I liked most of this book is the explanation on the evolution of agriculture to these days, making clear that Oil is an important contributor to production performance, due to the use of fertilizers, pesticides and of course the energy derived from it in Industrial Agriculture. I agree with the author that we are beginning a transition to a new way of living, not pleasant, due to the fact that oil depletion will make difficult to attain a sustainable agriculture, even a sustainable civilization with the population numbers we have. The effects are visible, inflation and food crisis.
Most people think that technology will remedy the situation, but if you read more about energy you will realize the future's precarious situation. Governments in the world need to put an eye on it and start doing energy projects, particularly Nuclear. India must control its population growth also. I have my opinion on Cuba but considering all this is a very informative book.

Crisis in Agriculture
I bought this book by Mr. Dale Allen Pfeiffer even after reading his horrible book "The End of the Oil Age."I don't care who this author hates, blames or votes for.I did buy Eating Fossil fuels and I must say that I am glad I did.It's a good work!It's professional.It's well written and in this book the author is not foaming at the mouth political.All liberal democrats leaning to the left just love Cuba and it's redistributing of wealth and the Cuban miracle.The Cubans decided to get up and grow vegetables rather than starving to death.Really, you guys give them too much credit for doing what's necessary to eat.Overall, I liked Mr. Pfeiffer's book.It's well done.Regards, Keith Renick, Peachtree City, Ga.

We Need to Bring Back the Victory Garden
I wish I had read this book last year, I would already have prepared a vegetable garden to plant this spring. I know about Peak Oil, etc. but this book really got my attention. It provides a clear explanation of how dependent our food supply is on fossil fuels. Higher and higher food prices are in store for us, soon. And that's before we start to see food shortages. The agricultural land in the U.S. can only support about 200 million people, and we have almost 300 million. Plus this agriculture is heavily dependent on oil (to run the irrigation pumps, harvest, process and transport the products), and natural gas (to make fertilizer..who knew?). In a politically unstable world of rising fuel prices, not to mention a future without those fuels, do we really want to rely on imported food to feed our nation? Or go to war over food? This book outlines the problems and has an action plan and extensive list of resources to help solve the problems. Yes! There are things you can do to avert this crisis, whether you live in the city, suburbs, or country.
Spade up those (organic) Victory Gardens, folks, and learn how to provide and preserve at least some of your own food. Support your local food producers. This year. You'll be glad you did. ... Read more

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Could there exist, deep within the earth's crust, asecond biosphere--composed of very primitive, thermophilic(heat-loving) bacteria, and containing more living matter than theentire surface of the planet? This radical idea, which initially metwith skepticism when it was first proposed by the author in the early1980s, is now supported by a growing body of evidence.

The implications are astonishing. The theory proposes answers tooften-asked questions about life on other planets and the origins ofsurface life on earth. Is the deep biosphere where life originated?Can Mars and other seemingly barren planets contain deep biospheres?Is there yet another--deeper, hotter--biosphere within the earth,based on silicon instead of carbon?

In the first book on this very controversial and intriguing theory,pioneering physicist Thomas Gold explores the likelihood of asubterranean biosphere, one that exists in a gaseous atmosphere atvery high temperature and pressure, and survives on chemicalenergy--hydrocarbons. This stunning book offers new insights intothe origins of life, the origins of natural gas and petroleum, and thedistribution of life in the universe. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (24)

Interesting and thought provoking
As a geoscientist of 30 years, and one who was involved in the use of soil hydrocarbons, helium, stable isotopes, and microbes in exploring for oil and gas, I found the book thought provoking and interesting.Gold tied together a lot of loose ends, and zeroed in on all the areas in which our understanding of the formation and occurrence of petroleum breaks down.

I used to teach classes in the petroleum system, and there are areas that you simply have to wave your arms when describing things.Topics like explusion and migration.The industry has always taken it as an article of faith that oil moves from point A, where it was generated from organic material, usually marine amorphous kerogen, not dinosaurs or fish, as some people believe, and is squeezed out and migrates underground along "fairways" to a trap which if everything is right, forms a reservoir.The trouble is we have never discovered a fairway, where you would expect to find traces of the migrated petroleum.We point to shaley source rocks as the potential source for petroleum.We say that the oil is squeezed out of the shale to be trapped elsewhere.But no one can answer the question at to how the oil moves from the very non permiable shale, the very same characteristic that makes extracting oil from plentiful oil shales so difficult.No matter, we just wave our arms and evoke the Geologic God of the Gaps and have faith that it just happened the way we think it did.Gold was right, this aspect of petroleum science has all the characteristics of religious dogma.

As a geologist who was schooled at a time when the Geosynclinal Theory of Mountain Building was being taught and Plate Tectonics was another "interesting" idea, I know what it is like to see a paradigm shift.Today we accept that Plate Tectonics is "the" correct answer, just as we once accepted another was the "right" one.We just could not explain the mechanism for the geosyncline deformation and the upthrusting of sediments or the intense volcanic activity in evidence.We just accepted there was something that caused it.Some great unseen and at the time, unfathomable force.Well eventually two and two were put together.Today Plate Tectonics is understood to be that force and Geosynclinal Theory has been encorporated into a much better understood overall conceptual understanding of which it is only one part.It took the overarching idea of shifting plates in the Earth's crust to tie together all the loose ends.

We waved our arms a lot back then, just as we do now.The fact is, so long as we can continue to find oil using today's understanding, there is no real need or impetus to search for what might be the true origin of hydrocarbons.While I was doing research for a major oil company, more than a few of my PhD colleagues who had a penchant for getting distracted in pursuit of interesting topics unrelated to their assigned duties, were reminded by their employers that we were first and foremost an petroleum company, and that their activities should be confined to doing research in areas that would make the company money. If they wanted to do "science projects" they should go back to academia or government service.Some of them did.In the end, that was it and all about it.

Only when the prevailing dogmatic ideas cease to be effective, will there be a push to expand our understanding of those gray areas.Depending on your point of view, Gold either died too soon and became a martyr of sorts, or died at the right time, never to see his ideas discredited, as without him to promote an alternative, dogmatists will just let them languish in obscurity without the need to take the effort to disprove him.Maybe one day, his ideas will be proven out, but it won't be by academia, as they do not have the funds to drill multi million dollar wells, and the petroleum companies don't either, at least not for science projects, at least not now.

Startling and revealing
This book is one of the most startling books I have ever read.Author Gold has been brave enough to try another approach to the way we view our surroundings.Coming from a well educated background he has opened new doors that have long been locked by old established ideas.

It is unfortunate that he passed away so soon as his thinking is needed in our world today.

Is oil really non-renewable?Is Peak Oil a sham?
An iconoclstic book threatens everything we knew about oil and its origins

[Disclaimer:I am not a creationist.Nor am I a supporter of its fake twin, intelligent design.]

This book could easily be titled, "Everything You Want to Know About the Formation of Oil, But Were Afraid to Ask - Is Wrong!"Is the author correct, or is he a bit too much of a flake on this issue?Gold died in 2004, but he certainly had the credentials (though I don't set a lot of store in those, necessarily).He was a member of the American Academy of Science, and a member of The Royal Society.You can't get any higher than those, unless you count the Nobel Prize.

So, what is he claiming?That oil isn't formed by swamps from the Permean Age settling their leaves, layer by layer, then getting compressed over millenia.He claims that what we learned in science class about salt domes is not where oil is found.Oh, oil was found there, but those were the easy locations.It has, he claims, been found in all kinds of other geological structures, and he is right about that.But most of us don't know that, do we?But the oil geologists do know it.The geological structures in which oil is found now are all over the map, literally and figuratively.No one existing theory can tell us why that is so, but in this book Gold tries to.

The status quo tries to explain oil showing up in other places - places it shouldn't BE - by speculating (and it IS only speculation) - that it migrates sideways, sometimes for many, many miles, from the (speculated) "right" places to the (actual) "wrong" places, where the oil geologists manage to wander upon it.

Gold's physics I cannot verify for sure, because I am not up on all of it.but what I CAN understand sounds good to me.I am a mechanical engineer, so I can have at least a semi-informed opinion, and to me it sounds at least worth looking into.

In the long view, whichever theory is correct will show out in the end, won't it?It may be 100 years, or it may be 200 years, but either the existing theory will prove out, or we will continue to find oil in places it "shouldn't" be (including our "depleted" oil fields).

I particularly like Gold's expansion of the argument to coal.Coal was laid down - so we are told - in essentially the same method as we are told oil was - swamps, layer-upon-layer, decaying, pressure, heat, time, etc.Lots of time.LOTS of time.But it all started out with swamps.Or did it?Then why - cutting diagonally across what is supposed to be tens and hundreds of thousands of years of layers of coal - are there tree trunks, spanning all those years?Heck, just the roots are projecting across a thousand years or more - what held the tree up all that time, while the layers formed around it?And why didn't it decay in all that time?

Why do I like this part?Because I have seen this myself.Am I imagining this?Am I misreading what my eyes told me?No, that was almost countless years of layers of coal, and that was one tree - intact - slicing through all those layers of "time".How did it happen? I don't know, but I do know that there is no way that that coal formed like they claim, not with that tree there.The tree would be turned to dust or mold long before 1/100th of those layers were laid down.Maybe the layers don't represent time, after all.But if not, then what DO they represent?I honestly don't know...

As to oil, Gold's theory, if correct, would have one hell of an impact on our thinking.

How so?

Well, if Gold is correct, and swamps from the Permean are not the source of oil, but it is created continually, down in the earth's mantle, THEN WE DON"T RUN THE RISK OF RUNNING OUT OF OIL - AND ALL PREDICTIONS OF PEAK OIL ARE WRONG.

Let me repeat that, for the casual reader:

There is a top scientist who is on record as saying that oil is NOT non-renewable.That actually would mean that it IS renewable.And that means our polluting can keep on going, I guess!(That was a joke...)

Gold also does us all a big favor in pointing out something that almost no one knows:

When oil fields are depleted, they sometimes re-fill with oil.

When someone first told me this, I was incredulous.But if it is true, what does that mean?...

...I don't agree with everything Gold says.Toward the end of this book, Thomas Gold overextends his ideas a little bit, getting a bit too ambitious for his theory, IMHO, but who can blame him?

I give the book a 95 out of 100.

Oil everywhere
I was very impressed Dr. Gold's crisp and persuasive arguments for the deep and non-biological origin of petroleum.Dr. Gold pictures the greater part of the Earth's biosphere infiltrating the rocks of the upper crust, where autotrophic bacteria feed on virtually limitless upwelling hydrocarbons from the planet's interior -- a hypothesis that culminated in the fascinating "Siljan" experiment in 1987, in which tens of millions of dollars were invested drilling a 5-mile well into the granite of Switzerland in search of non-biological hydrocarbons.Dr. Gold states that crude oil and other hydrocarbons were recovered from rocks where conventional geology said they could not exist.Unfortunately, this may not meet Carl Sagan's threshold of "extraordinary evidence," since his work seems to have been largely ignored by modern geologists.Nevertheless, this tightly reasoned and polished book made a believer out of me.Among other fascinating statements, Dr. Gold believes the world's oil reserves are actually slowly "recharging," and that life originated within the Earth's crust.I certainly recommend this book to anybody with an interest in oil, geology or the origin of life.

-- Auralgo

Scientific theory, or maybe just true !!
As a geologist familiar with the traditional theories about accumulations of oil and related gases in structural domes, I was skeptical of Gold's theories.But the more I read, the more I became convinced his explanations of facts that went unaccounted for using the old theories had some merit.Of course, the only problem with his theory is that we will never be able to prove it.To prove it we would have to drill at least 200 kilometers down into the earth.But his five assumptions are valid and not disproveable.Plus, I read a recent newspaper article that scientists have found evidence of a deep unidentified source of methane gas.As a scientist you can poo poo it, but hey, wait until all evidence comes in, at least give the author that much respect. Recommended for those scientists who have an open mind. ... Read more

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Suppose someone claimed that we are NOT running out of petroleum. . . .Or that life on Earth began below the surface, in the dark airless pores of our planet's rocky crust. Or that oil and gas -- so-called "fossil fuels" -- are not the product of biological debris. You might expect to hear statements like these from an author of science fiction. But what if they come from a renowned scientist, someone who has been called "one of the world's most original minds"?In THE DEEP HOT BIOSPHERE, Thomas Gold sets forth truly controversial and astonishing theories: First, he proposes that Earth supports a subterranean organic domain of greater mass and volume than the biosphere -- the total sum of living things -- on its surface. Second, he proposes that the organisms inhabiting this Deep Hot Biosphere are not plants or animals but heat-loving bacteria that survive on a diet of hydrocarbons -- natural gas and petroleum. And third and perhaps most amazingly, he advances the stunning idea that most hydrocarbons on Earth are not "fossil fuels" but part of the primordial "stuff" from which Earth itself was formed some 4.5 billion years ago.The Deep Hot Biosphere may seem difficult to believe at first glance, but its theories are supported by a growing body of evidence, and by the indisputable stature and seriousness Thomas Gold brings to any scientific enterprise. In this book we see a brilliant and boldly original thinker, increasingly a rarity in modern science, as he develops revolutionary conclusions about the fundamental workings of our planet, the origins of life on Earth, the nature of earthquakes, and even the likelihood of life on -- or within -- other planets. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (38)

A Legacy To Mankind - The Deep Hot Biosphere
Absolutely The Deep Hot Biosphere is a precious legacy not only for science but for mankind.
Thomas Gold's work can be considered as a light that illuminates our thoughts and lead us to a better understanding of the true nature of hydrocarbons and their evolution on Earth and beyond. One of the important developments is to rethink the true nature of earthquakes that could save lives if the ideas are studied and developed with current technology.

Plausible, convincing theory
Thomas Gold is a maverick. But his theories are well-buttressed with calculations and such evidence as we have been able to obtain to-date. I really wish he'd devoted more to the spontaneous arising of self-sustaining life forms out of organic molecules. That's the Holy Grail of biology - how did life start. The best that Gold offers is "auto-catalyzing" molecules with no concrete examples. That said, however - the book is a fascinating read and has completely revamped my understanding of our planet. Highly recommended. Be warned however - it will tax your memories of chemistry classes.

An Interesting Read
Keep in mind that the "Peak Oil" crowd has been predicting the end of oil for a very long time and we know how that has worked out.Whether Professor Gold is a plagiarist or not matters little - the science is what matters.Can the West expect an honest appraisal of hydrocarbon abiotic origins, or will vast sums of money pollute the science as it has climate research.Perhaps the Russian oligarchs will school the West, or are already doing so.What we do know is that, in science, nothing is "settled" and we cannot afford to close minds and reject any idea.If there is money to be made in the deep, hot biosphere, some enterprising capitalist will be there - now if we could just deal with the environmentalists who will inevitably proclaim that exploring the deep biosphere will lead to ecological catastrophe...

Life abounds in unlikely places?
This is a marvelously readable and accessible book positing the theory that microbial life lives deep in the earth's crust, feeding off methane that percolates up from the earth's interior.

The idea is well supported with evidence that supports his view.His theory appears to meet the Occam's Razor requirement for the simplest explanation be be true. If correct, the theory provides an abiogenic explanation for fossil fuels, veins of metals and possibly for a deep, hot origin of life.

This book supports the theory that life can originate far more widely than generally believed using the surface conditions model (sunlight and water) and thus may be present on other bodies of the solar system, including the moon and Mars.To me this is a great potential test of the theory and is particularly relevant for Mars now that methane has been detected in the atmosphere.The current debate is whether this is abiogenic or biogenic (created by methanogens), but Gold's hypothesis would suggest that the methane's origin is almost irrelevant, life may be below the surface feeding on the methane. If Gold is correct, we might expect to see macro presence of oil and coal seems, exposed on crater walls and valley cliffs.Analyzing this material, if found, for metabolic and structural products would indicate the presence of life.In other words, the "search for water" approach adopted by Nasa, while appropriate for surface based life, might be missing the real picture by searching in the wrong place.

This book is a real eye opener for those of us who were educated to belief that the evidence for carbon fuels favored a surface biogenic source. Highly recommended.

Creative Thinking
Thomas Gold was a creative thinker and scientist who has added much to the world's knowledge.While there is no conclusive evidence that oil and natural gas are residue from the earth's formation, exist in virtually unlimited quantity and will continue to percolate upward from great depths, Gold reasons logically from the evidence we do have to conclude that this is the case.And the evidence he cites is more plentiful than you might imagine: from giant tube worms living near geologic vents completely cut off from the sun's energy in the deep ocean, to an exploratory well drilled in non-sedimentary rock in Sweden that turned up small quantities of petroleum, Gold reasons logically and creatively to form a theory that makes sense.Living creatures, however simple, thriving at great depth and high temperatures is an important clue. Petroleum contains biologic molecules that have served as proof that oil is the result of deposited plant material originating on the surface that has been converted to oil by heat and pressure as these sediments are folded beneath the earth's tectonic plates.But if there is abundant biologic activity in the form of microbes and bacteria living naturally up to 200 kilometers beneath the surface, and relying on primordial hydrocarbons for food, then the ballgame is fundamentally changed. Gold follows this logic into other areas, such as the origin of life on the surface, where the implications are equally revolutionary.If you are wedded to the concept of oil and natural gas as limited resources, and the theory that all life originated with photosynthesis on our planet's surface, this book will shake your world.
... Read more