Is Earth a giant gas station?

Perhaps the world is not running out of oil, but it is literally a factory of hydrocarbons. This chimera begins to have overtones of reality according to a study published in the journal 'Nature Geoscience'.

For the first time, scientists have found that ethane and heavier hydrocarbons can be synthesized at high pressures and temperatures of the upper mantle layer, without thereby intervening organic matter from dead plants and animals.

If they are right, the planet could be a hydrocarbon factory, a giant gas station. That is, the oil components are not only formed by the decay of plants and animals but also in abiotic conditions without intervention life. In a way, this would demonstrate that fossil fuel reserves are essentially inagotables.Y because humanity today depends on fossil fuels, oil supply would be virtually unlimited (other issue is the problem of climate change).
Simulation of the Earth's mantle

The team of Alexander Goncharov of the Geophysical Laboratory of the Carnegie Institution in the US, simulated the conditions of the mantle with a diamond probe and a laser. It subjected to methane at pressures were 20,000 times higher than atmospheric, and temperatures between 700 and 1226 degrees Celsius, the conditions that would be found between 72 and 154 kilometers deep. Formed methane ethane, propane, butane, molecular hydrogen and graphite.

Ethane, subject to these conditions, resulted in methane. Heavy hydrocarbons can theoretically exist at those depths. In complete absence of organic matter. One theory put forward by the late astrophysicist Thomas Gold and gender at the end of the last century no little controversy.

Professor Kutcherov, who also participated in the study, believes these experiments come to agree to a controversial theory, which held that the oil and gas deposits received contributions from the mantle, from the depths of the earth, given by Russian and Ukrainian scientists. And he greeted the news. "We need to know more about the synthesis and stability of the compounds and heavier hydrocarbons that have studied under these conditions." The experiment confirms that the theory can be implemented.