:: Coal and oil are made from plants and animals that died millions of years ago ::
Well, time to STOP reading this article.
SOURCE: https://www.worldcoal.org/coal/what-coal
Coal formation
All living plants store solar energy through a process known as photosynthesis. When plants die, this energy is usually released as the plants decay. Under conditions favourable to coal formation, the decaying process is interrupted, preventing the release of the stored solar energy. The energy is locked into the coal.
Coal formation began during the Carboniferous Period - known as the first coal age - which spanned 360 million to 290 million years ago. The build-up of silt and other sediments, together with movements in the earth’s crust - known as tectonic movements - buried swamps and peat bogs, often to great depths. With burial, the plant material was subjected to high temperatures and pressures. This caused physical and chemical changes in the vegetation, transforming it into peat and then into coal.
Coal and oil MAY have has as one of their basis for formation, the conversion of plants and animals that lived millions of years ago, but there is also abiotic means of formation of both coal and petroleum.
Down at the interface between the rocky crust of earth, and the molten interior, there lies a curious formation, the Mohorovicic discontinuity. Much physical and chemical activity takes place here, using supercritical carbon dioxide as a fluid and resulting in the formation of high-carbon compounds both in combination with the monatomic hydrogen, striped of its electron, and as major precipitation of nearly all-carbon layers, as graphite, coal, or even diamonds.
A relatively good grade of crude oil, kerogen, may be made on an industrial scale using a process called Thermal Depolymerization, using hydrous pyrolysis for the reduction of complex organic materials (usually waste products of various sorts, often biomass and plastic) into light crude oil. It mimics the natural geological processes thought to be involved in the production of fossil fuels. Under pressure and heat, long chain polymers of hydrogen, oxygen, and carbon decompose into short-chain petroleum hydrocarbons.
All that is needed is heat and pressure. Heat may be provided by using a concentrated heat source, like Thorium-fueled molten salt atomic reactors (which may also be used for electrical power generation), and in a sealed container which also has some amount of water. The water becomes superheated steam, which provides the pressure, and also, at about 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit, water decomposes into monatomic hydrogen, providing the conditions similar to those found at the Mohorovicic discontinuity. Evolution into petroleum proceeds quite rapidly, often a matter of minutes, depending on the kind of biomass used as feedstock.
We need never run out of petroleum.