A theory long on the fringes of petroleum science gained some
support from new research this week, but it is probably not
enough to launch the concept into the mainstream. The idea: What
if fossil fuels were not fossil after all? What if hydrocarbons
could form from chemical reactions deep inside the earth, rather
than from the "pressure cooking" of organic matter? "[Abiogenic]
origin of oil has been proposed by many before, but there are
arguments pro and contra," said Alexander Goncharov, a
geophysicist at the Carnegie Institution. Goncharov and his
colleagues in Russia and Sweden have experimentally shown for
the first time that ethane and heavier hydrocarbons can be
produced under the pressure and temperature conditions of the
upper mantle, the slightly viscous layer of the earth directly
below the crust. Their research was published this week in
Nature Geoscience. "Our results provide a link which was
previously missing or was doubtful because of a lack of in situ
measurements ... for the upper mantle co