Thomas Gold, a maverick physicist without a PhD, proposed many bold and contrarian ideas and theories across many disciplines throughout his life. As the great physicist Freeman Dyson wrote in the foreword to Gold’s book The Deep Hot Biosphere: The Myth of Fossil Fuels, “Gold’s theories are always original, always important, usually controversial — and usually right”. Probably, one of his most intriguing theories is about abiogenic origins of fossil fuels.
Conventional wisdom has it that oil and coal are remnants of ancient surface life that became buried and subjected to extremes of temperature and pressure. That is why we call them fossil fuels. However, Gold suggests that these deposits are not fossil fuels as widely believed, but the products of primordial hydrocarbons dating at least from the time of the Earth’s formation.
I am excited to see that Gold’s theory is in perfect agreement with my study on stellar nucleosynthesis under the new mirror matter theory (see my paper Neutron-mirror neutron oscillations in stars or a pop science essay in Chinese). In essence, the crust and core of a massive star at its late burning stage (just before it explodes as a supernova), is mainly made of oxygen and heavier elements (up to iron group), and rarely of any carbon. Carbon is actually made in the helium atmosphere (and possibly leftover helium in the thick O/Ne layer) via the so-called neutron-assisted triple alpha process (i.e., reactions of 2α+n→9Be and α+9Be→12C+n) when the crust and excessive neutrons are blasted away during a supernova explosion. The crust debris could trap some of newly made carbon along with hydrogen and helium in the atmosphere and eventually be captured by another forming star and become the solid cores of planets orbiting the star. When it cools down, hydrocarbon would be formed, even deep underneath the surface of a planet. Therefore, it is natural to see hydrocarbon in most of the planets if not all. It is also no wonder that anomalous amounts of helium and hydrogen gas have been found in association with petroleum deposits. Indeed, fossil fuels should be called cosmic or stellar fuels. They are not only providing energy in our modern society, but also probably the seeds of the first life on Earth.