As a child, I was always told that when the dinosaurs died, they eventually got broken down into crude oil, which get refined into a list of products.
Well I seen a post somewhere that was saying the crude oil wasn’t made from dinosaurs. So if it’s not made from the remains of the dinos, how it is made then.
In: 93
Crude oil comes largely from marine algae and zooplankton. Despite being millions of years old and cooked deep in the Earth, certain molecules called porphyrins associated with these types of life have survived in trace amounts in the oil.
The process of oil formation is incredibly complex and not fully understood, but it is a combination of heat, pressure and lack of oxygen that creates the enormous number of hydrocarbons in petroleum from dead material by way of a substance known as kerogen.
The organic material has to reach a point known as the oil window – too shallow and it never gets hot enough to turn kerogen into oil; but it can’t get too deep – above a certain point the oil will break down into natural gas. The window is roughly 50 – 120C which requires the dead material to be buried several kilometres beneath the surface.
Then there are issues of whether the rock it is in will release the oil, how the oil migrates, whether it can be trapped…
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