NASA Strikes it Rich!

Do you know where there is enough natural gas (methane), and propane to meet all the world's energy needs for the next thousand years?

No, not in Saudi Arabia, not in Siberia, and not the in Antarctic, in fact it isn't on Earth.

Nasa has just announced that they have "struck it rich" on Titan!

But where the hell is Titan?

To quote wikipedia:
"Titan is the twentieth most distant moon of Saturn and sixth farthest among those large enough to assume a spheroid shape. Frequently described as a satellite with planet-like characteristics, Titan has a diameter roughly 50% larger than Earth's moon and is 80% more massive. It is the second-largest moon in the Solar System, after Jupiter's moon Ganymede, and it is larger by diameter than the smallest planet, Mercury (although only half as massive). Titan was the first known moon of Saturn, discovered in 1655 by the Dutch astronomer Christiaan Huygens"

NASA has just announced the Cassini probe that is orbiting Saturn and its many moons has detected a lake near the south pole of Titan that is a little bigger than Lake Ontario (see the Nasa website ).

So what is so interesting about this? Well according to NASA the excitement is because it is the first planet/moon apart from the earth to have had a liquid detected on its surface - hip hooray!

But that isn't very exciting to you or me but on the other hand the lake doesn't contain water; it is made up of ethane, propane and probably other liquid hydrocarbons. The whole of Titan is awash with the stuff but the surface temperature of Titan (−179° C, or −290° F) means that methane rains down from the sky and ethane and propane are liquids and some of the rocks are actually water ice.

Why doesn't the whole place catch fire? After all methane, ethane etc are highly explosive.

There is no fire hazard on Titan, simply because there is no oxygen there. You would treat oxygen on Titan the same way we treat methane here - as an explosive gas!

In reality, this announcement will do nothing to solve our current fuel crisis. It would take more energy to get the methane and ethane gases and liquids from Titan back to Earth than would be provided by the fuel when burnt here.

So Earth's fuel crisis isn't going to be solved by Titan - or is it?

I was taught that oil and natural gas was formed by the decomposition of billions and billions of fish and plankton trapped in the earths crust under impermeable salt caps for millennia. This is proved by the fact that tiny skeletons or fossils are found in the oil - hence the term "fossil fuel".

But where are the fish and plankton that made all the fossil fuel on Titan? How could so much "fossil fuel" be made in such a cold environment 10 times further from the Sun than the Earth in the absence of oxygen and liquid water?

Perhaps once billions of years ago the Sun was hotter and hot enough to support life on Titan - but if that was the case then any life on Earth at that time would have been fried and Earth itself would have been burnt to a crisp.

So perhaps Titan moved... perhaps - but that seems to be rather unlikely.

How about it got some energy from Saturn - that's a possibility, for example gravity could induce heat in the surface like on Io (that's another story), but Titan is the twentieth most distant moon of Saturn, so this seems unlikely that there a biosphere beneath the surface warm enough to support liquid water and life, though this is proposed by some scientists. But even if there is could that biosphere be responsible for the production of so much ethane, propane etc?

So where did all these Titan hydrocarbons come from if not from fossils?

Hydrogen and carbon are very common elements not only on Earth, but throughout the Solar System. The Sun, Jupiter and Saturn are 99.99% hydrogen - the surface of Venus is shrouded in a blanket of hot high pressure Carbon Dioxide and Uranus and Neptune are mostly composed of water, ammonia, and methane...

There's methane again... Were there fish and plankton on Uranus and Neptune? It seems more likely to me that methane occurs naturally throughout the solar system - in fact methane, and other hydrocarbons have been detected in clouds in deep space far across the universe... When you put together carbon atoms and hydrogen atoms which occur through out the universe inevitably these will combine to form more stable molecules like methane (CH4) and from time to time two methane molecules will combine to form ethane (CH3CH3) which in turn can combine with methane to form propane (CH3CH2CH3) etc etc etc...

So methane and the higher order hydrocarbons occur naturally (abiogenically), without the existence of life through out the whole universe...

except on Earth.

On Earth everyone knows that methane and higher order hydrocarbons (including oil) all come from tiny little fish and plankton!

It seems rather odd to me that we should be the exception to a "universal" rule.

So what are the implications of this?

Well first of all it implies that at least some of the stuff we drill out of the ground isn't a fossil fuel at all but has always been here since the Earth condensed out of the cloud surrounding the young Sun.

And if it has always been here then it should be mixed fairly evenly through out the Earth's crust - we just detect the stuff that is close to the surface and that hasn't evaporated away because it got stuck under impermeable rocks and salt domes where it mixed with fish skeletons and other fossils similarly trapped.

What evidence have I got for this theory? Well apart from Titan that is difficult. I could point to the presence of helium in natural gas which is difficult to explain (to you and by the petroleum scientists).

I'm not the first to come up with this harebrained idea - there was a geologist called Professor Thomas Gold of Cornell University (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Gold), who propounded this theory back in 1979 and as a result a very deep well was drilled into a meteorite crater that forms Siljan Lake in Sweden http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siljan_(lake). According to Professor Gold the meteorite should have cracked the earth's crust an allowed some of the deep abiogenic methane to be found at depths that would preclude it from being made biologically.

Everyone laughed at him and his project failed...

But given all that methane and ethane on Titan...perhaps Professor Gold was right after all. If he was it means that we should never run out of oil and gas, though we may have to drill a lot deeper for it. If that is the case then the price of oil and gas (and energy in general) should plummet - one of the drivers for the recent spike in the price of oil (apart from greed and speculation) was worries about oil reserves - BP for example has only 13 years worth of oil reserves left and everyone thinks that perhaps we have reached the "tipping point" and the world's oil reserves will soon dwindle to zero, but thanks to Nasa and Professor Gold perhaps that will never happen...