Why is the Middle East so rich in oil reserves?
In: Planetary Science
In short, petroleum comes from ancient algae.
The middle east, in ancient times, was under an ocean where previously mentioned algae accumulated.
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The modern desert covering the Arabian peninsula is like the past 2 minutes of your life vs what happened years ago when you were 3 years old. The organic material that formed the oil deposits are hundreds of millions years old. They were ancient when dinosaurs were still walking around the earth.
FYI the Middle East doesn’t have the most oil of any place on earth. They just have the most “easy to get to, high grade” oil.
There are tons of other options but cost more to drill. Venezuela has more than Saudi but theirs is low grade. Texas and North Dakota have a lot of high grade but expensive to extract oil. And there are vast areas of the earth that haven’t been explored for potential oil yet.
Oil comes from ancient (millions of years) algae which dropped to the bottom of lakes and rivers before they could be consumed and were laid down in layers of the rocks over time the pressure and other conditions converted them into oil the oil would then pass through some rocks heading towards the surface before being blocked by impermeable rocks and pool underneath those rocks. These conditions are found in Americas, the North Sea, Nigeria and many other locations like the Middle East, many of these locations were exploited earlier than the Middle East since the Middle East compared to many other regions didn’t use much oil they became key exporters of oil.
Important point to remember is that the Americas and Europe were oil rich too but have been pulling it up for 100+ years before the Middle East really started capitalising on theirs.
From Britannica.com:
“An important effect of the evolution of the ancient Tethys Sea was the formation of the giant petroleum basins of North Africa and the Middle East, first by providing basins in which organic material could accumulate and then by providing structural and thermal conditions that allowed hydrocarbons to mature.”
The Rock in the area worked out to form a pretty good almost impermeable Bowl. If you watch theoretical progressions of continental drift over Millennia and keep your eye on this area you will notice it slowly drifting around in tropical and subtropical regions. This allowed a lot of algae to grow in the shallow Seas and the geography that most damn near a bowl keeps it collected in large pools making it more economically feasible to access
I stupidly thought it said Middle Earth, and I was like “did they ever use petroleum in the lord of the rings?” And “middle earth probably isn’t even old enough for fossil fuels to have formed in any great quantity, unless Eru Illuvatar willed it so, right?” It’s been a long day.
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