Scouts Out! Cavalry Ho!
It damn sure isn’t dead dinosaurs - sorry greenies!
Has the theory of abiotic oil ever been proven or disproven?
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I don’t think that the theory of abiotic oil has been proven or disproven.
Rather what’s happened has been that a better understanding of oil underground has come about.
Since the dawn of the oil age 150 years ago less than 10% of the oil underground has been extracted. That means that 90% o the oil is still underground. For the past hundred and fifty years oil men could only get oil from traps under salt domes or similar structures where oil accumulated from source rock below.
The fracking revolution is enabling driller to get at the source rock. But even with today’s technology its thought thought that fracking will enable driller to get at only another 10-20% of the oil. Over time as technology improves that percentage may improve.
For example, its thought currently that the Baaken/Three Forks formation has over 900 billion barrels of oil in place of which maybe as much as 45 billion barrels is commercially addressable. But even now only a small fraction of that 45 billion barrels of commercially addressable oil is PROVED oil.(see the graphs above for an explanation of the definitions.)
10-15 years ago when you heard stories about oil structures that refilled—people opined that maybe the earth itself was making the oil. These days you wouldn’t hear that because people know that the big pools are being fed by source rock below that frackers are currently targeting.
There will always be those that believe in the wishful thinking.
But a few facts are:
Oil is only found sourced to sedimentary basins.
Oil is never found igneous rock.
Oil contains micro-fossils of the organism that were laid down in the same sediment.
Carbon in oil is too old to carbon date.