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In the end, EVERYTHING is finite. So is life and the stars and the oceans. What's your point?
You stated that we are drawing from infinite reservoirs of oil. We're not. It requires no mathematics and prediction curve to know that whatever amount of oil is contained in the oil fields of earth, that amount cannot be infinite.
I am not being snarky. I really want to know the basis for this conventional wisdom. Why is it considered "settled?" Are we supposed to shut up about this too? If the theory didn't exist and somebody came up with it, would it be believable? Just how many tons of meat do you need to make billions and billions of barrels of oil with no end in sight?
Nobody ever believed this nonsense. It's a straw argument creationists throw around like it is real. Another hot one is, "If humans evolved from monkeys, why are there still monkeys?" It's an argument used to sway the ignorant.
The formation of crude oil is a very complex process that proceeded in different ways in different places. Some areas, like the Bakken shale deposits, represent layers of algae and mud laid down over millions of years, then pressed by the overburden of further deposits and heated by the radioactivity in the earth's rocks for more millions of years. This eventually cooked the deposits into a thick, tarry crude. Other places, marine deposits at the bottom of shallow seas were covered by an impermeable layer of salt as the sea dried and vanished, often many times. Domes in the salt overburden allowed crude to concentrate under pressure, which is where the oil geysers come from. Most crude oil deposits were laid down long before dinosaurs evolved.
There is also an ongoing discussion about how much methane contributes to crude oil deposits. Some of the earth's original methane is still down there, locked in rocks and water under pressure. We're mining it right now through fracking, which is why natural gas is so cheap. It may be that under the right conditions of heat and pressure, methane can be cooked into crude oil. We really don't know.
Last edited by Larry Caldwell; 03-30-2017 at 05:44 PM..
Are you SURE they won't find another oil field worth couple of hundred billion barrels in a couple of years? You know they will. You can't "publish" the news that hasn't happened yet.
They have already found it. Shale oil deposits extend from the Dakotas through Montana, Wyoming, Utah and eastern Colorado.
I read a theory about that many years ago. There were a bunch of Russians in the 1950's who thought it came from comets and asteroids as the solar system was being formed.
I figure there's some basis for it but don't have a clue about percentages. Maybe a few percent abiogenic but mostly from decomposition of organisms?
That would be my guess -- organic material is found in carbonaceous chondrites, but that kind of meteorite is rare:
Current consensus is that algae and plankton in ancient seas are the source of the bulk of the oil on Earth, not dinosaurs or terrestrial plants. There's a LOT of biomass tied up in plankton.
The hydrocarbons on Titan -- they're mostly short-chain hydrocarbons and probably formed from methane. Though there are tholins on Titan (more complex organic gunk) that have formed from the simpler hydrocarbons over time.
Nobody ever believed this nonsense. It's a straw argument creationists throw around like it is real. Another hot one is, "If humans evolved from monkeys, why are there still monkeys?" It's an argument used to sway the ignorant.
The formation of crude oil is a very complex process that proceeded in different ways in different places. Some areas, like the Bakken shale deposits, represent layers of algae and mud laid down over millions of years, then pressed by the overburden of further deposits and heated by the radioactivity in the earth's rocks for more millions of years. This eventually cooked the deposits into a thick, tarry crude. Other places, marine deposits at the bottom of shallow seas were covered by an impermeable layer of salt as the sea dried and vanished, often many times. Domes in the salt overburden allowed crude to concentrate under pressure, which is where the oil geysers come from. Most crude oil deposits were laid down long before dinosaurs evolved.
There is also an ongoing discussion about how much methane contributes to crude oil deposits. Some of the earth's original methane is still down there, locked in rocks and water under pressure. We're mining it right now through fracking, which is why natural gas is so cheap. It may be that under the right conditions of heat and pressure, methane can be cooked into crude oil. We really don't know.
Not really Larry. The methane in the rocks didnt come first. The oil did. Methane always disassociates under heat and pressure. It all probably started out as liquid or solid methane untill life came along. You know that we are carbon. Carbon is us and carbon is life. Most froms of carbon found on the planet today were living organisms of some sort and in the future will belong to another living organism.
Anyhow oil is made from life. All types of life. Probably only a very small amount of Dino thou.
The biggest problem I have with the abiotic theory is that seeping up seems very problematic to me, fractures or no fractures. And the animal and plant remains found in coal can't be explained by later bacterial action.
So while abiogenic formation is interesting, and certainly seems possible, I'm not ready to abandon the biogenic theory just yet.
You stated that we are drawing from infinite reservoirs of oil. We're not.
Looks like you are taking me literally but not seriously.
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