– is the planet making more oil?

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We know that oil is formed from prehistoric plants being converted to oil under pressure in the earth’s crust. Is this process still happening, but we’re not able to access new sources due to using current resources too quickly, or is there only a finite amount and we’re going to run out entirely one day?

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Anonymous 0 Comments

Not really. The reason is that there was lots of stuff that died before there were microbes, such as fungi, to decompose things. Because things didn’t decompose for millions of years, it just kind of built up a layer of bio-mass that never rotted away.

All of that bio-mass eventually got covered up by dust, dirt and more dead things. Once it was deep enough under ground, heat and pressure changed it into “hydrocarbons” or a soup of chemicals that are the Building blocks of energy.

Since mushrooms and other microbes evolved to consume dead things, there just isn’t as much bio-mass being generated to create more oil. It also took an enormous amount of time to accumulate enough dead things for all of that to happen, so utnis very unlikely that it will haooen again the same way.

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