In grade school I remember learning that the creation of crude oil in the Earth’s crust was a rare event. How was so much created?
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Oil forms in deposits of ocean sediment where the remains of millions of years of dead plankton have been buried. The Earth’s surface is mostly covered in ocean, and it is billions of years old, so there are a lot of places that have ancient ocean sediment deposits.
Back in the day, there were lots of living things that no other living things really knew how to eat. As such, when those things died, they got buried underground. This was the case for a loooooong time, so there were lots of dead things that got buried.
These dead things were the source of the hydrocarbons we use now.
It is rare, and in any given year only small deposits (i.e., deposits that would become oil in the future) were laid down. However, the Earth is very old, and over time those rare events accumulated. We have to use pretty sophisticated science to find oil, you can’t just randomly dig a hole in the ground to find it.
there’s huge reserves in Russia and Canada, but for different reasons, they’re both extremely hard to extract, or otherwise “not worth it” in the minds of the infinitely rich oil companies.
There was a theory that we were approaching, maybe even passed, “peak” oil and soon our supply of oil will be smaller and smaller.
We are extracting more and more oil from resources once thought depleted by fracking. That’s when you pump thousands of gallons of waste products down one well and that pushes the residual oil towards the other wells. We don’t know what toxic sludge they are putting down there because former VP Cheney got a law passed saying they don’t have to tell, but we should just take their word for it that nothing bad will come of it, despite all the videos of people’s water faucets are now flamable (literally) and hundreds of earthquakes eminate in areas with lots of fracking going on….sigh, off on a tangent again.
as for the creation of oil, I’m not so sure its aged dinosaur juice. But sure organic matter probably plays a role, vegetation etc I mean we get cooking oil from grains, etc….then there’s archions (sp? are kay ons) recently discovered protein strings that were discovered earlier because we didn’t have instruments that could see that small, now we can look at atoms and dang there is life, if you can stretch the def of life. believed to be the mechanism that causes rust. Its potentially an ongoing process to make oil.
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