I recently learned that oil is mostly composed of algae and phytoplankton capturing carbon out the atmosphere thousands of years ago. Later the organisms fall to the bottom of the ocean and through time turn into crude hydrocarbons. So why do we not attempt to create the same crude oil by using alge with waste water from water processing plants?
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A lot of that oil comes from woody plants. The reason it was able to stay wood long enough to get buried and become oil is that there were no decomposers on earth that could break down the lignin in the wood at the time. We call this time the Carboniferous Era for this reason.
Wood just piled up and eventually was buried by dirt and wind, where the carbon chains recombined as the material was heated in the absence of oxygen.
All the energy you get from oil is sunlight that was locked up in chemical energy when the plants were photosynthesizing. Nowadays fungus will get to it before it has a chance to become oil, but if you want to see some hundred million year old sunlight, just set some gasoline on fire.
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