Why is there so much Oil in the Middle East?

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Considering oil forms under compression of trees and the like, doesn’t that mean there must have been a lot of life and vegetation there a long time ago? Why did all of that dissappear and only leave mostly barren wasteland?

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Anonymous 0 Comments

You’re not thinking back nearly far enough in time.

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.

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