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Originally Posted by
greg_the_great http://forums.somd.com/images/button...c/viewpost.gif Oil is not "fossil" fuel. It is a continual source of energy and we will never run out of it. OMFG, do you really think that?
If you mean, does it come from decayed dinosaurs, yes, it is not a fossil fuel. Even geologists who believe in the biogenic origin of petroleum don't claim this. They believe it is a part of long process of decayed sediment on ocean floors. Even so, there's evidence to believe that most organic matter in the ocean never reaches this point.
Believe it or not, there's a growing theory that oil does not derive from "fossil" material at all. One supporting piece of data is that we are currently drilling far beneath the lowest known fossil layers and extracting oil from them. A second observation is that all the world's biomass could not account for the volumes of oil that have been accounted for or used thus far. It's believed that it did NOT derive originally from living organisms.
Hence the abiogenic process of petroleum origin. Some parts of the world, such as in Russia, this is what geologists believe. I suspect there's a little of both going on, but neither process is subtle or simple.
I do faintly recall while in high school, someone set out to "prove" the abiogenic origin by drilling in a place where oil deposit couldn't possibly have formed biogenically. This was about thirty years ago - lemme check, quick - ok, found it - a guy named Thomas Gold convinced the Swedish government to drill a very deep borehole to prove his theories. They'd found a region in the granite layer that had once been struck by a meteorite, so it made drilling down 4.5 kilometers much easier. It yielded about 80 barrels of oil. Not much but it helped to prove Gold's much maligned theories.
There's a lot about this, and I'm not a geologist. I think, practically, it doesn't matter. Even if oil is "renewable", it's not "renewing" at a pace with demand. So the point on a practical level is moot.