IU South Bend Professor Lead Author of Report

Could there be a huge reserve of untapped methane, the main component in natural gas, deep in the earth’s crust? According to a recently released report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) that possibility may need to be explored more thoroughly.

Indiana University South Bend physics and geology professor Henry Scott is the lead author of the PNAS study along with Russell Hemley and Ho-kwang Mao, both of the Carnegie Institution’s Geophysical Laboratory, Washington, D.C.; Nobel Laureate Dudley Herschbach of Harvard University; and Lawrence Fried, Michael Howard and Sorin Bastea of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

The team of researchers found that there is a possibility of an inorganic source of hydrocarbons deep within the earth from a simple reaction between water and carbon-bearing rock. The traditional theory is that fossil fuel is formed over millions of years from the breakdown of plants and animals. These fossil fuel reserves exist close to the earth’s surface in oil fields.

Often, gas reserves are accompanied by liquid petroleum. Since the first U.S. oil well started to gush in 1859, commercially viable wells of oil and gas commonly have been drilled no deeper than 3 to 5 miles into earth’s crust.

The experiments show that methane can form independently of living organisms and remain chemically stable at pressures and temperatures similar to conditions at 120 to 180 miles beneath the earth’s surface. The team used a diamond anvil cell (two gem-quality diamonds with flattened tips that are pressed together) to squeeze materials common on the earth’s surface such as iron oxide, calcite and water to pressures many thousands of times the pressure of the earth’s atmosphere. The scientists heated the mixture with both a resistive heating method and by focusing laser light up to 2,700 degrees Fahrenheit.

These experiments point to the possibility of an inorganic source of hydrocarbons at more than 100 miles down where the pressures and temperatures are extremely high.

Scott cautioned that their findings do not offer a quick cure for high gas prices or oil politics. “These results in no way alleviate the immediate problems we face regarding our natural resources, but they do suggest that additional research is needed to fully understand how hydrocarbons form in the earth.”

"This paper is important," remarked Freeman Dyson, professor emeritus at Princeton University’s Institute for Advanced Study who reviewed the study. "Not because it settles the question whether the origin of natural gas and petroleum is organic or inorganic, but because it gives us tools to attack the question experimentally. If the answer turns out to be inorganic, this has huge implications for the ecology and economy of our planet as well as for the chemistry of other planets."

9/17/04

For further information contact Henry Scott at (574) 520-5527 or hpscott@iusb.edu