To: exit82
No appreciable amount of oil has come from dinosaurs, which like a deer on the side of the highway, were scavenged by the buzzards, fire ants, worms, and the like of their day. Oil comes primarily from algae, which lives in the photic zones of the oceans. When it dies, it falls to the bottom. Only under certain conditions is the water anoxic (lacking oxygen) so that the buzzard’s equivalent on the bottom of the ocean don’t consume the organic matter. It takes millions of years for a significant amount of material to accumulate and then be buried to around 10,000’ deep for catagenesis to take place.
To: crusty old prospector
If all oil is the result biotic matter being compressed and cooked, then by definition, it is a renewable resource up until about one hundred thousand years after all living algae has disappeared.
There was algae yesterday, there is algae today, and there will be algae tomorrow.
We could never build enough barrels to contain even one thousandth of 1 percent of all the algae in our oceans.
Oil is a renewable energy regardless of which theory of it's creation is used. It's just a matter of finding it and pumping it. Old wells will refill just as do forests, just takes a lot longer.
FreeRepublic.com is powered by software copyright 2000-2008 John Robinson