Dear Prof. Batterham and all forum readers
Oil is not a ‘fossil fuel’ but is a natural product of planet earth – the high-temperature, high-pressure continuous reaction between calcium carbonate and iron oxide – two of the most abundant compounds making up the earth’s crust – and water in the form of superheated steam. Russian and Ukrainian scientists found that a continuous reaction occurs naturally at a depth of approximately 100 km at a pressure of approximately 50,000 atmospheres (5 GPa) and a temperature of approximately 1500°C, and will continue more or less until the ‘death’ of planet earth in millions of years’ time. The high pressure causes oil to continuously seep up along fissures in the earth’s crust into subterranean caverns, which we call oil fields. Oil is still being produced naturally in great abundance, and is a sustainable resource – by the same definition that makes geothermal energy a sustainable resource. With this knowledge, Russian and Ukrainian scientists developed geotechnical science to better predict where to drill for oil. This explains why Russia is today one of the world's major oil and gas producers and exporters.
A team consisting of Russian scientists and Dr J. F. Kenney, of Gas Resources Corporation, Houston, USA, have actually built a reactor vessel and used it to provide physical proof that oil is produced from calcium carbonate, iron oxide and superheated steam. Further, they wrote a paper which was published in 2002 in the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS), where they also provided the theoretical analysis that proves that for the alkanes comprising petroleum, except for methane, to be formed from biological matter (i.e. for oil to be a fossil fuel) would be in contravention of the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The URL for this paper is www.pnas.org/cgi/content/full/99/17/10976
It is therefore highly likely that Australia has plenty of oil and will have for thousands of years.