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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>I recently learned that oil is mostly composed of algae and phytoplankton capturing carbon out the atmosphere thousands of years ago.
More like hundreds of millions of years. Which is basically the answer to your question. We don’t want it to take hundreds of millions of years. If something is technically renewable, but only on a time scale that is longer than most species exist for (the average lifespan of a species is only between 10 and 20 million years) it isn’t in any real sense renewable.
If we all went extinct right now and in five million years the rats took over, they *still* wouldn’t have any oil because not enough time would have passed yet.
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