Titan: A Moon Made Of Oil
Posted by Big Gav in moon, saturn, titan
The SMH reported today that the European Space Agency has found that one of Saturn's moons (Titan) is an oilman's dream - a "giant factory of organic chemicals". It is rumoured that Dick Cheney is having invasion plans drawn up as we speak, with Exxon believed to have the inside running on a heavily one-sided production sharing agreement with any single celled organisms that are discovered in the soup...
Imagine a place awash with more hydrocarbons than a Texan oilman can dream of and where no one has staked a single claim -- all that energy is just going begging. The problem: this massive reserve is at least 1.2 billion kilometers (750 million miles) away from Earth, on a tiny inhospitable world where on a warm day it's minus 179 degrees Celsius (minus 290 degrees Fahrenheit).
New findings by the mission to Titan, reported on Wednesday by the European Space Agency (ESA), say Saturn's orange moon has hundreds of times more liquid hydrocarbons than all the known oil and natural gas reserves on Earth.
Methane and ethane fall like rain from the sky, forming massive lakes and seas, while complex organic molecules called tholins are believed to make up Titan's oily dunes, ESA said in a press release.
"Titan is just covered in carbon-bearing material. It's a giant factory of organic chemicals," said scientist Ralph Lorenz. Lorenz, of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, is a member of a team poring over radar data sent back by the US space probe Cassini, which dispatched a European probe, Huygens, to the moon's surface.
Understanding Titan's carbon-chemistry cookbook may unlock knowledge as to how Earth's carbon-based life began, the researchers hope. The study appears in the latest issue of the journal Geophysical Research Letters.
3 comments
Too bad it takes more energy per kilo to get from Saturn to the Earth than is contained in hydrocarbons. We're probably talking an EROEI of 0.05 here.
Hmmm - I wasn't thinking about bringing it back down here to burn - we've got enough problems with carbon emissions as it is.
It is interesting from a space travel point of view though - Titan could become the local petrol station for spacecraft. And abiotic oil theorists get a kick out of this sort of news.
Abiotic oil is a reality. Where did all this oil come from? Certainly not plankton or dinosaurs. Help stop the globalist artificial scarcity cartel (big oil, opec) from monopolizing an abundant renewable resource for profits. Deep oil is profitable look at the largest oil producers in the war Russia and Ukraine.
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