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
The key to all of this, is that is not specifically what it was made of, but what didn’t exist yet, that makes crude oil/coal.
Just as today, there was far more plant life than animal life. What didn’t exist was the fungus and bacteria to decompose dead material. When you cut your grass or the leaves fall off the trees, the process begins of decomposition. It’s how compost works. All that material breaks down and becomes fertilizer and soil. We don’t end up with millions of years of leaves laying on the ground.
In the beginning, all that dying matter just laid there getting more on top of it. Eventually it was buried so deep the pressure formed hydrocarbons.
Later, that process stopped. Organisms developed that could unlock that energy and use it for their own purposes. The accumulation stopped. That’s why there is no more coal and oil being formed. That’s why it’s getting harder and more expensive to find.
There are ways to make fuel from plants now, but it will never be as cheap as extracting millions of years of accumulation over a few hundred years like we’re doing now.
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