Rebuttal of article in Nature Reports 21 August 2002
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Mr. Philip Campbell,
Editor Thursday, 12 September 2002. re: J. F. Kenney, V. G. Kutcherov, N. A. Bendeliani, V. A. Alekseev, (2002), "The Evolution of Multicomponent Systems at High Pressures: VI. The Thermodynamic Stability of the Hydrogen-Carbon System: The Genesis of Hydrocarbons and the Origin of Petroleum," Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 99, 10976-10981. ref: T. Clarke, "Fossil fuel without fossils," Nature, 21 August 2002. Dear Sir: The article published in Nature to which reference is given above, is willfully dishonest and gratuitously untruthful. Clarke and Nature substantially misrepresent our article published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.1 Please note the partial corrections which follow. 1.) Your statement that "Kenney and his team were unavailable for comment" is an outright falsehood. The authors of our article have made ourselves readily available to your reporter Clarke. We sent five (5) communications to Clarke by e-mail, which included attached documents of other publications and much additional information. Clarke never responded with even the courtesy of acknowledgment. Three days ago (09 September 2002), Clarke finally sent to us a message apologizing for not having responded to our previous messages, giving a lame excuse that he had been "in a hurry to leave for vacation." 2.) Clarke and Nature have willfully misrepresented the results, reported in our article, of the high-pressure experiments demonstrating the genesis of petroleum hydrocarbons. Clarke misrepresented our results as having demonstrated the genesis of methane and octane, only. Our results reported the spontaneous genesis of methane, ethane, propane, butane, pentane, hexane, heptane, nonane, and decane, in both the normal and branched isomers, and alkenes, in the distribution characteristic of natural petroleum. 3.) Clarke willfully disregarded the sections of our article (sections 1 and 2) which reviewed the constraints imposed by the second law of thermodynamics upon the genesis of hydrocarbons. The second law of thermodynamics prohibits spontaneous genesis of hydrocarbons heavier than methane in the regimes of temperature and pressure found in the near-surface crust of the Earth. This fact has been known by competent physicists, chemists, chemical engineers, mechanical engineers and thermodynamicists since the third quarter of the 19th century. Contrary to the misstatements by Clarke, there is no "debate" on this consequence of the laws of thermodynamics, - nor on any other aspect of those laws. That natural petroleum is not a "fossil fuel" has been known (by competent scientists) since the time of Clausius, Boltzmann, Gibbs, and Mendeleev. The scientific problem connected with the genesis of hydrocarbons has been that genuine scientists have not heretofore been able to explain how, and under what conditions, such molecules do spontaneously evolve. Our article has resolved this question: Petroleum hydrocarbons heavier than methane are the high-pressure members of the hydrogen-carbon system; their spontaneous genesis requires pressures comparable to those necessary for the spontaneous genesis of diamond. 4.) Clarke's ipse dixit and unsupported assertion that the spontaneous genesis of hydrocarbons can "be recreated in the laboratory," is a gratuitous falsehood. Such experiments have been attempted by diverse persons (who have been ignorant of the overriding constraints of the laws of thermodynamics) numerous times during the past century. All such attempts have failed, without a single, legitimate exception. Hydrocarbons can be (and are) synthesized at low pressures by the well-known Fischer-Tropsch processes, or the Kolb reactions. Such are driven, not spontaneous, processes. Heat can similarly be transferred from a colder to a hotter body, - so long as one drives the process by a refrigeration engine; however, such processes do not occur spontaneously in the natural world. 5.) Petroleum formed in the mantle will not "be forced towards the surface by water," as Clarke has written that some "geochemists concede." Water is a (very) limited, minority component in the mantle. The eruptive transport process which brings petroleum fluids into the crust is gas driven, of great force, and involves nitrogen and methane. 6.) There is not any "wealth of chemical evidence" which "points to" a biological origin. Correctly, there is no such "evidence" whatever. The molecular structure of hydrocarbon and biotic molecules is determined by the quantum mechanical properties of the covalent carbon bond. Such is utterly independent of whether the molecule is of biotic or abiotic origin. A review, and repudiation, of such erroneous "looks-like/therefore-comes-from" arguments involving so-called "bio-markers" has been given at modest length in Energia, 22, September 2001, 26-34. A copy of this article was sent to Clarke. 7.) The claim of one "McCaffrey," gratuitously repeated by Clarke, that "biological signatures have been a good predictive tool" for petroleum exploration, is nonsense, and stands in willful disregard of a century of bitter experience by petroleum explorers. The statistics of exploration success for western petroleum companies, drilling while following the traditional British/American biological-origin-of-petroleum (BOOP) notion, and in absence of seismic information (which permits visual identification of oil in the ground) is no better than one (1) successful commercial well out of approximately twenty-eight (28) dry holes, - which statistical success rate is no better than random. This fact had been pointed out to Clarke. 8.) Clarke has chosen to quote a canard of one "Michaelis, a geochemist from the University of Hamburg," to the effect that no one "in the petroleum community takes this prospect seriously." The four authors of the article cited are from the Academy of Sciences of Russia, the largest petroleum producing and exporting nation in the world. The authors, all experienced oil and gas men, active in the exploration and production of petroleum. Clarke and Nature would have exercised minimal responsibility to demand to know from "Michaelis" how much oil and gas he has discovered lately. The same holds for "McCaffrey" and the other nonentities quoted. This article has been written to place the modern Russian-Ukrainian theory of deep, abiotic petroleum origins into the mainstream of modern physics and chemistry; it has been published in the American Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in order to acquaint persons in the English-speaking world of this body of knowledge. Modern Russian petroleum science has transformed Russia from, in 1946, a petroleum poor nation to, presently, the largest petroleum producing and exporting nation in the world. Clarke, and Nature, have made no effort to write a competent or factual report of our article. During the past half-century, since Nikolai Kudryavtsev first enunciated modern petroleum science is 1951, there have been published in the scientific journals thousands of articles, and many books and monographs on the subject. A substantial number of those articles have been submitted to Nature for publication. Without a single exception, the Russian authors have been treated contemptuously, and insultingly, by the editors and reviewers of Nature, hiding in cowardly manner behind anonymity. The present behavior of Clarke, and Nature continues such conduct. yours truly, J. F. Kenney V. G. Kutcherov N. A. Bendeliani V. A. Alekseev 1 J. F. Kenney, V. G. Kutcherov, N. A. Bendeliani and V. A. Alekseev, "The evolution of multicomponent systems at high pressures: VI. The genesis of hydrocarbons and the origins of petroleum," Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A., 2002, 99, 10976-10981.
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