Is there oil beneath your feet? Petroleum products are usually deemed "fossil fuels," created from once-living organisms. But oil may be a renewable resource that is literally beneath everyone's feet.(ENERGY)

abiotic (a'bi at'ik): adj. Originating from sources other than biological materials such as plants, animals, or other formerly living organisms.

Two illustrations from my junior and senior high-school science textbooks have stuck in my mind for some 50 years. The first was a drawing of a German shepherd-sized horse with graphics demonstrating how this tiny equine evolved by biologic stages into today's large "modern" horse. The second memorable diagram showed multiple strata of the Earth's crust with dinosaurs and plants being converted into petroleum by the pressure and heat of compression from layers of rocks and soil that had somehow built-up miles above their remains.

Years later, in a long-forgotten source, the first of these images was tarnished by an article reporting that archeologists had determined that the smaller horses were in fossil formations considered to be of a later date than modern steeds. And now the second of my long-held high-school beliefs is being challenged by a number of geologists and planetary scientists. They don't believe oil is a product from the conversion of biotic (once-living) sources, but is an ongoing process occurring continuously deep within our planet--a region described by the late astrophysicist Thomas Gold * in his book of the same title: The Deep Hot Biosphere.

The Abiotic Theory

The conversion of carbon and hydrogen into molecules of various hydrocarbons is thought, by those theorists who support abiotic oil formation, to be possible only at extreme depths, approximately 60 miles--which is an order of magnitude deeper than present technology can examine directly. Here, according to abiotic theorists, carbon and hydrogen are combined to form methane, which in turn forms the multitude of hydrocarbon chains we know as petroleum. Being lighter than the surrounding rock, the hydrocarbons are buoyed up toward the surface, but are usually stopped by an impenetrable layer we call bedrock. There they may accumulate indefinitely until a fissure occurs, allowing a continuation of their rise toward the surface where they then often pool in sedimentary rock.

One of the causes of fissures is the impact of asteroids or comets, such as that causing the Chicxulub Crater on the Yucatan peninsula in Mexico and often associated with the extinction of the dinosaurs. This collision fractured the bedrock in the Gulf of Mexico in an area where major oil fields have been found, including the second largest on Earth, the Cantarell Field, discovered in 1976 by a fisherman of that name who thought he was over a sunken boat leaking fuel oil.

Similarly, the bedrock beneath Saudi Arabia is seriously fractured. Abiotic theorists claim the evidence shows the major oil fields in that country are directly over the fissure lines.