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Welp, I guess this guy is out of a job...
(His name is Dino, pronounced Dy-no)
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I’ve been in O&G since 1981.
In the late 1970s Total Oil (now Total Energies) commissioned a mass balance study
It consisted of the amount of oil and gas already used (circa 1978) balanced with the assumed amount (mass) of carboniferous life in all years since the fossil ages.
Taken into account is the “decay” factor of (a very conservative 2%) carbon-based material left to form oil and gas.
For perspective, most life forms are made up of 98% water and (for humans) almost 1% calcium.
When a person dies, the body desiccates, leaving (conservatively) 2% (w/w) of its mass to be made into Oil and Gas.
A single Brontosaurus would be responsible for less than a gallon of oil and less than 1000cuft of natural gas.
Plants, even less, even though they are more prevalent, their relative mass is much less, on the whole.
They did not include fossilization where the carbohydrate “walls” of cells are calcified, their carbon content is used to form CaCO3.
The study concluded that the mass of all previous lifeforms, up to 1975 (or thereabouts) would have accounted for very little oil and gas (actually, coming very close to that 2% number, which is mathematically obvious).
Subsurface oil and gas MUST come from processes unrevealed to us.
Abiotic oil.
Sadly there are CPA and MBA in charge of our oil companies that thnk we are on the \back\ side of peak oil.
Because some communist passed a few regulations.
The API buried this study and never published it.
Some people love to be ruled over.
Iāve always considered the trope that land animals were a component of hydrocarbons to be tongue-in-cheek. The vast majority of them are never fossilized. Organic material derived hydrocarbons are almost exclusively the purview of massive organic rich, lush, depositional basins. Even low elevation critters seldom make it into basins like that because their remains undergo mechanical degradation along the path to their final resting/covering spot. Every fully preserved dinosaur found in the fossil record probably is representative of millions of extant creatures. Having a ābackstageā pass to the Smithsonian once really sank that in for me, they had racks of triceratops skulls. Granted, a plains/lowland animal predominantly, but it was easy to grasp them being the equivalent to Buffalo in the Cretaceous.