Posted on 07/30/2025 11:12:34 AM PDT by Red Badger
No, your car isn’t running on liquefied dinosaurs.
The good stuff, unless you want a stable environment, of course.
Image Credit: Alexander Knyazhinsky/Shutterstock.com
At some point, you have probably heard somewhere that oil comes from dinosaurs, as if every time you fill up at the gas station, you are pumping refined velociraptor into your Volvo. It’s a vivid image, but it’s not true. Despite how widespread the belief is, oil isn’t made from decomposed dinosaurs.
“For some strange reason, the idea that oil comes from dinosaurs has stuck with many people," geologist Reidar Müller from the University of Oslo explained to Science Norway. "But oil comes from trillions of tiny algae and plankton."
As algae and plankton died tens to hundreds of millions of years ago, they sank to the bottom of the sea, where they accumulated and were buried by layers and layers of sediment. Eventually, after millions of years in a high-pressure and low-oxygen environment, the algae and plankton got "cooked" and turned into that sticky black oil we humans apparently can't get enough of, despite the threat of a climate emergency. From here, it seeps upwards until it hits rock it can't make it through, requiring humans to drill it out (or some other natural disaster to set it free again).
VIDEO AT LINK................
While marine dinosaurs – or a T. Rex that discovered its arms weren't particularly well-adapted to swimming – may find themselves on the bottom of the ocean after death, it's unlikely they would get converted into oil themselves.
This is partly because an oxygen-deprived environment is needed to convert organic matter into oil. Once dead, they would have become a meal for smaller aquatic creatures, picking them apart until they got down to the bones, long before they could be buried.
Now to explain why, "if dinosaurs actually existed", their bones aren't everywhere.
An earlier version of this story was published in 2023.
algae and plankton got “cooked” and turned into that sticky black oil...
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Wrong. Crude oil was here long before either algae or dinosaurs. Crude oil is made of carbon and hydrogen. If you put the two atoms together in nature they make crude oil.
I think those dinosaurs were cute. Someone in the PR department must have come up with that and slid it by the executives. And technically, oil is a fossil fuel. It comes from microscopic fossils of algae and other no see’ums.
I hope you’ll let me know when you find more of those magic wells that just start producing again. Barring a recompletion, workover, or some form of enhanced recovery like a water flood, when a well is dead, it is dead. Either too little pressure or too much salt water.
Technically, the phrase is correct. Fossilized algae that is converted to kerogen that is cracked to form hydrocarbons.
“Crude oil is made of carbon and hydrogen. If you put the two atoms together in nature they make crude oil.”
Well, maybe methane. Or with enough pressure (like 10-50 Gpa) and catalysts you can get bigger stuff, like liquid hydrocarbons in crude oil.
(50 Gpa is roughly 500,000 times atmospheric pressure at sea level)
We’re not Jupiter, so I don’t see that happening on Earth.
Would it also need to get warmer for trees to grow and produce O2?
Sign me up for some of them magic oil wells, Uncle Jed. Swimming pools. Movie stars.
I’ve got a well that went from 10bbl/day to 100.
Mind you, the neighboring operator did a huge frac 300 yards off the lease line, but that’s just a a coincidence.
j/k (Not about the well, that’s real. The “coincidence”. We also got a ton of water for two days.)
LOL.
Yea, I forgot about that scenario. A frac hit.
Should we tell them about the sea bed fossils that consistently come up from a Permian Reef?
I have a whole room of old cores with them.
Must be a coincidence, too.
*
I know of a few in the Gulf that dried up and were capped.
A few years later they were producing again.
There is one example that I know of. Pennzoil’s Eugene Island Block 330. Check the Interweb for details. Oil migrated up the fault from below due to pressure differential.
There are times when the earth stood still - that is, the planet appeared to not be rotating.
Because earth was flat - meaning, round without much of any significant changes in altitude and no disturbances, nothing smashing into it, almost no wind, and not much depth-volume of surface water to be affected by the moon:
The difference between high tide and low tide would be a change - somewhere less than 0.5 centimeters.
Within the goo + muck of earth’s surface + very thin layer of water, worms developed. Large quantities and various forms and sizes.
Such living things, in various places, were baked, fried, crushed, radiated, etc., as the earth changed shaped —> toward what it became, with dramatic altitude changes and sea depths, and changing again, toward what earth is now . . . wind and water slowly working what they can, back to the lower altitudes and some, into the water.
During the monumental changes, lots of heat and pressure, on organisms, forcing the blending further and further underground.
Thus, some oil plus some gas, beneath the surface.
I have a rock, estimated to be several hundred million years old, in which the worms (existing over many years), moved thru when the materials of the pre-rock, that was: goo + muck + water.
That recipe was at some point in time, crushed into the depths of the earth.
But this rock and its inhabitants, are a remnant from when the earth was flat.
Is my theory.
Nope, nope. All oil and gas comes up from the mantle. There is an endless supply. But greedy oilmen sit around in board rooms with smoking jackets and cognac trying to figure out how they can turn the screws on ‘Mericans. Just watch Landman. You’ll see.
They’re not magic. Somebody has to put up the money to test and redrill a new well. Once an old well is capped that’s usually the end for that spot.
Being in Midland, Landman is required watching.
I like how a guy works a rig one day, a workover the next day, and production another.
Believe it or not, the plane thing is based on a true story of a stolen jet.
The Midland Country Club scenes are actually the San Angelo Country Club. We elected to not let them film. (I’m a member of both.)
The thing about a Mercedes being “every other car” in Midland is pretty true. I followed a Laborghini SUV to work today. Although Range Rovers and G-Classes are for women.
The bar scenes are supposed to be “The Bar” in west downtown Midland. Same feel, no bear, like in real life.
The house in the show is in Grasslands.
The old folks home is Manor Park.
The windmill scene is Sterling City.
It’s kind of fun. The blondes are hot.
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