Where does petroleum oil come from?
Kevin Kelly wrote a short blog entry about The Unclear Origins of Oil. People do not agree on the source of oil. Kevin presents three possibilities. Maybe none of them are correct, maybe one or more are correct.
1. Oil comes from algaeKevin says "In any case I am betting on bacteria as the creators of oil simply because I've learned to never bet against bacteria."
"The conventional wisdom is that oil descends from algae from eons ago. Lots and lots of algae. Unimaginable mounds of dead algae in quantities no longer found on this planet, pressed, and cooked into hydrocarbon liquids."2. Oil is abiogenic (non-organic)
"Others, notably the Russians, have an alternative theory that oil comes from non-biological carbon compounds deep in this planet, like the methane oceans we find on other planets."3. Oil is produced by bacteria
"An emerging third theory is that bacteria living within rocks produce oil. In this theory there is a biological component (the bacteria) which constitute the oil-generating process, but the originating material in not degraded organic material, but rather geological carbon gases."
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And here I though it was decayed dinosaurs!
Does anyone remember the Sinclair Gas stations, with the Brontosaurus logo? I had an inflatable one that I got as a promo from them. It blew away on a lake:(
Really?
I see this waffling as an opening for the god botherers, who are likely to say that the divine oil was put there specifically for us to burn.
teach the controversy, mark!
my experience has been that people who promote these theories use it as a way of, like atomische said above, claiming that "God wants us to burn oil", or else denying the existence of global warming through some sleight-of hand, or both.
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the fundamental issue here, though, is that none of these "theories" are currently falsifiable. ergo, they are indistinguishable from religion.
While "People do not agree on the source of oil," people also don't agree on whether continents drift and the earth is round.
@3: Is every non-falsifiable idea worthless to you?
Hang on now. We can make gasoline out of algae today, (get ready for the future)
Also, I bet against bacteria just this once. My understanding it that organisms that use a chemosynthesis involving a terminal electron acceptor other than oxygen (pretty much guaranteed underground, since there is no sun, and no oxygen) don't produce much more than rock deposits.
Two comments:
First, why does it only have to be one way or the other? Isn't it possible that all three (or some completely different theory) could be responsible for some portion of the oil?
Second, I've been researching the economics of oil and have been unable to find any readily available info on the value of a barrel of refined oil. That is, what is the retail value of all the products obtained from a barrel of oil? The closest answer I 've found is "$1000s of dollars". Anyone?
I bet Alton Brown could tell you how it's made.
@#^: "My understanding it that organisms that use a chemosynthesis involving a terminal electron acceptor other than oxygen (pretty much guaranteed underground, since there is no sun, and no oxygen) don't produce much more than rock deposits."
Or coal. On the other hand, methane is produced by non-biogenic methods.
And if a genus of bacteria is the donor, why have we not isolated it yet?
This is the second time I've heard of the "Oil from Earth" theory. It sounds so absurd, but I'm no geologist.
Whatever the source, is there any disagreement that we're using it faster than it forms?
fear not, after you finished pumping the septic tank of The Old Ones, you will receive your desserts. Humanity was created for a purpose.
DUH!! Obviously petroleum is an expression of God's unending love for His creation. Which is exactly why we should burn it.
Oil is thought to be an product of life for several reasons.
A) We don't find a lot of oil outside of sedimentary basins. The Gulf of Mexico, Siberia, the Persian Gulf are huge stacks of sediments. You can drill other types of rocks all you want but you're not going to find it.
B) Most oil comes from sedimentary rocks which fall within the Phanerozoic ( The age of Visible life). Further back the amount of oil (and evidence for oil) rapidly disappears until a ~2.1 billion years there no evidence for any oil anywhere though the rock record continues on for another 1.9 Billion years.
C)There is a very close correlation between fossils and oil an example is the Green River Oil shales which are rich oil and fossil organic material.
However,it's not a one to one correlation between fossil bearing rock and oil. Oil has to be heated to the right temperature and no more, otherwise it burns away. Also oil is highly mobile. It migrates through all sorts of rocks until it gets trapped.
@#7,danwhits
Dude ... from TFBP
We should have to at least read the blog post to comment :)
All 3 theories are dependent on a combination of time and geological processes that are impossible in a universe that is only 6000 years old. So the only logical answer is that oil is jeebus juice.
duh... I always thought that the oil rained down on the Earth as an after effect of the close passage of Venus... see Velikovsky's "worlds in collision"
"This car runs on Jeebus Juice" would be a great bumper sticker.
Maybe oil comes from bugs! But we shouldn't be investigating where it comes from, we should start forgetting about it.
Oil comes from decayed organic matter deposited in anoxic environments under water (mostly continental shelves, rarely in deep lakes). Could be anything from algae to whales, but by and large its the smaller stuff. Bacteria are no doubt involved somewhere in the decay process. Proof that oil is not spontaneously generated from within the earth is that oil is depleted in the rarer isotope of carbon (carbon 13). This is a fingerprint of life, because biochemical processes tend to efficiently exclude carbon 13.
Well, if oil comes from bugs, there is a possibility that we can breed bugs to produce fuels that don't pollute as much.
#20: A lot of folks are doing just that.
A bug-derived fuel doesn't even have to pollute less to be a help, although that would probably be a nice side-effect. Growing the bugs would suck CO2 out of the air, so you're carbon neutral. That in itself would be a big win.
There is a phrase "THE RUSSIANS KNOW SOMETHING"
but it's made from primordial slime, I think. That third one seems ludicrous to me, surely that bacterium would have been discovered at some earlier point.
The FSM put it there 5,000 years ago
Does anyone remember the Sinclair Gas stations, with the Brontosaurus logo? I had an inflatable one that I got as a promo from them. It blew away on a lake:(
Sinclair Oil still existed a few years ago when I drove from DET to SLC, passing through Sinclair Wyoming. The gas stations have been gone from MI for decades. I was so excited to find one out west. I went in and asked if they had any merch with the dino on it. Nothing but blank stares. But I took pix of the refinery and of the dino statues.
Bah! When I was a kid they told us it was from the dinosaurs. Wait, no...that was Airplane!
There are a number of interesting characteristics to at least some types of oil that make for interesting arguments against the abiogenic origins. Specifically, oil is a phenomenally complex set of hydrocarbons- not the least of which includes a fair chunk of aromatic compounds (benzene rings) that are highly unlikely to be formed in the absence of life. There's also little bits about pristane and phytane- complex markers that are characteristic of things like decomposed chlorophyll (chlorophyll -> phytol -> pristane, and chlorophyll -> phytol -> phytane) that simply shouldn't readily- if at all- be formed abiogenically.
It is almost certain that there are different routes to oil, so there is probably some that is produced abiogenically, and probably some from bacteria, and a lot from algae. Oil is highly variable, which is unsurprising as it is found under highly variable circumstances. Some of it has been found in rocks that are not the normal source rocks for oil; however, we know that oil "travels," and can come from sedimentary rocks, followed by it being squeezed and moving through different sediments until such point in time that it is "captured" in a reservoir rock or formation. Finding oil in limited quantities in extinct volcanoes need not be from abiogenic oil, although it seems possible under these circumstances.
The simple fact of the matter is that almost all recovery occurs from either deep ocean sediments (thus offshore drilling), or in reservoirs where geologists and geophysicists agree that it is highly likely that oil will be found. If this were not the case, we would find oil from just drilling willy-nilly, which although probably occasionally productive, is certainly not the manner in which most liquid hydrocarbons are recovered. It doesn't make economical sense as- quite simply- the oil is not known to be there. Lack of searching? Maybe, but that's not how the oil companies see it.
DANWHITS, try here: http://www.eia.doe.gov/kids/energyfacts/sources/non-renewable/oil.html#Howused
Did you know a 42 gallon produces 44 gallons of oil products? (That's because some of the products are lower density than crude oil.)
We revisit old science all the time and frequently discover problems. Clinging to a century old theory of oil formation doesn't strike me as being pro-science so much as pro-dogma.
@Mark (#5):
@3: Is every non-falsifiable idea worthless to you?
I'll bite.
Can you name a non-falsifiable idea that has a value beyond that of entertaining / amusing / diverting us? The idea of Batman has value to me when it helps me kill a dull hour here and there, but it's of no direct practical value in telling us about the evolution of bats, or the sociology of crime, or whatnot. I'm not arguing that imagination-based human culture has no value, far from it, but you're not going to, say, plan the future of a national economy on the basis of "what would Bruce Wayne do?" That's the category to abiogenetic orgin of oil falls into, along with flying saucers, yeti and the hollow earth.
That's the category to abiogenetic orgin of oil falls into, along with flying saucers, yeti and the hollow earth.
A statement like that requires citations and/or credentials. Otherwise, it's just hot air. The 'just cuz' argument doesn't cut it.
Re bugs and geology: There are some fascinating recent theories about some caves' formation being driven by biological processes using chemicals as the source of energy, some of the bugs even using gases created by pockets of oil deep below seeping up. Google up "cave snot" if interested. Life sure crops up in the darnedest places.
@29/Imipak:
Many ethical ideas are non-falsifiable. Pretty much any statement of the form "X is wrong" isn't. Yet I'd have a hard time with someone saying that many of them aren't useful.
Hell, there's an entire branch of philosophy, non-cognitivism, devoted to the study of non-falsifiable moral statements.
@#7 "danwhits":
"Second, I've been researching the economics of oil and have been unable to find any readily available info on the value of a barrel of refined oil. That is, what is the retail value of all the products obtained from a barrel of oil? The closest answer I 've found is "$1000s of dollars". Anyone?"
It's probably impossible to put an exact value on the final products of a barrel of oil, simply because oil can be made into an enormous variety of different things. (A lot of plastics are produced from oil, for example.) So the value of any given barrel of oil would depend on exactly what things it was made into, and possibly also where you sell those things.
I can't verify this so it could be totally false, but I have also heard that making oil into gasoline is probably the LEAST valuable thing you can do with oil. However, since gasoline is in huge demand everywhere, so you can still make a awful lot of money turning oil into gas and selling it in huge quantities.
I am sorry but I really would like to know what #3 said starting with 'mr klly'. Devowling may have a purpose ,but I can't even tell if he is being offensive....
Reading stuff in the blog comments I think is a little bit like watching television. If you don't like what is on, you change the channel or turn the set off.
And, yes if it wasn't the end of the day for me and I wasn't darn tired, I could probably decipher it myself.
The Moderation Policy explains the rationale for disemvowelment. You can find it in gray just above Recent Comments.
Might be algae, might be plants, but the theories other than "ancient biologic material, trapped underground for a very long time" are just crankery, abiotic oil transparently so.
theories other than "ancient biologic material, trapped underground for a very long time" are just crankery
Your proof? Or is it just more hot air?
@32/PaulDRye
@29/Imipak
@#3
@Mark
In general I have to agree with Imipak. While it is true that there are some non-falsifiable ideas/philosophies that are extremely valuable, such as ethical issues pointed out by PaulDRye, the question posed here is a question of fact: "where does oil come from", not a question of philosophy such as "Is oil a good thing".
For a question or idea which endeavors to explain any natural phenomenon to have any relevance as a scientific theory it must be testable in some way. Things that attempt to explain natural phenomena but are not testable are simply speculation, and often form myths. They do not constitute or attempt to advance knowledge, defined as justified true beliefs (with an emphasis on the justified). Thus, in this specific context of explaining the origin of oil, an untestable/unverifiable/unfalsifiable idea is indeed worthless. We see that online all the time too: someone makes an apparently outlandish claim, another asks for proof, that's a broad circle of natural inquiry.
It is essential for all of us to appreciate the difference between scientific inquiry and speculation- that sentiment might not be verifiable, but it's a philosophical one and I'll stick to it.
I have a pretty good idea that it's D: all of the above.
Here's a good book on the earth oil theory:
The Deep Hot Biosphere: The Myth Of Fossil Fuels
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We will not run out of oil. If we switch to renewable energy quick enough, the oil stays in the ground; if we don't, global warming will render us nonindustrial before we extract it all.
There is a lot of oil out there. Remember, before it was put there the world's land was to a large extent swamp rather than the dry land it is today. The biological changes involved in going back to the carboniferous era would destroy us long before it actually got there.
JCD,
I took your advice and minimized the waste of finger energy.
MMMMM "finger energy"
dependent on a substance that we (the world) consume about 100 million barrels a DAY and we don't know where it comes from
DOH!
are you sure the sun won't burp tomorrow?
http://blog.apocalypse.org/2006/10/06/solar-flares-to-bring-about-mayan-apocalypse-in-2012/
I sort of doubt option #3. If oil was made by bacteria, you'd need either a compound in higher energy state which degrades to oil, or some other energy source for which the oil compounds act as an electron acceptor.
Plus, if there are bacteria down there, it seems like they would have long ago evolved a method of extracting all that energy that's in the oil.
As a petroleum guy let me say theres only about
25 years research showing that biomarkers are present in almost all oils. These are essentially liquid fossils that point out the biological origin of oil. We talk a lot about source rocks; those sedimentary rocks with significant organic carbon content, that are the geological start for generating oil.
This is pretty solid science guys, in use by every real petroleum geoscientist.
That said, there is some room for abiogenic origins, but the vast bulk of petroleum liquids can be shown to have biological origins.
Put aside your sniping and audit some geology courses, eh?
lousy Nova Scotian skua...you got any clathrates over there?
Soylent Crude Is People!
The technology has been around for decades. We were only able to refine a few drops of oil out of Rockefeller, but current research shows that we could easily get two quarts out of George Bush and nearly a gallon out of Dick Cheney. Though pro-oil politicians, lobbyists, and oil company executives give high yields, by far the highest yield comes from teenages, as is well known.
It's hard to say when things will get dire enough to tap into this solution, but as gas approaches $20/gallon, industry execs may be dropping the last scruples they have to make even more profit.
#19 Rockdork and #26 Osprey101 are on the right track.
It's just amazing to me that there was a net build-up of such an energy rich substance on this far from equilibrium planet. The principles described in the book "into the cool" suggest the existence of universal inertia leading toward the degradation of energy-rich gradients like carbon-rich fossil deposits. In other words I am surprised some superbug did not come along to exploit the resource long before us super-monkeys came along.
The "deep hot biosphere" is on my "need to read" list.
Oil-producing bugs are already here. From the Times in London, "Scientists find bugs that eat waste, excrete petrol."
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article4133668.ece
This seems like the biggest breakthrough in 20 years of energy science. Wonder why it's not getting more attention...
Oil DOES come from dinosaurs - dinosaurs that roam the inside of the Hollow Earth!
Enlightenment from our savior eustace! The hallowed earth beckons our call!
Praise Eustace!
ILL LICH
"DUH!! Obviously petroleum is an expression of God's unending love for His creation."
I think Benjamin Franklin said that about beer, And he was right.
How about, "It's black, so you know it must be bad," instead.
I've got a chemist in the family and they wrote:
"They list all the explanations except the time-honored and most plausible one - vegetable matter from primeval forests... That would probably explain why one finds hydrocarbons ranging from anthacite coal, through oil shale though peat, to liquid petroleum, depending on the heat and pressure to which the matter was subjected. You are probably going to hear a lot of wishful thinking these days about inexaustible supplies of oil. Even if it were true, it might not be a good thing to put all the carbon dioxide from it back into the atmosphere in a couple of hundred years."
Succintly put. That fresh breeze of clear thought...
@#51 Dougo. Good point about the bugs - why hasn't oil been 'used up' already by organisms? That's why oxygen-poor deep-water environments are needed to make oil source-rocks. Here the organic material can be buried without fully decaying. Once buried it remains anoxic and protected from further breakdown. Turns out that organic carbon burial is an important part of the carbon cycle - it helps regulate the long-term climate. Conversely, rapid release of that stored carbon by burning so much oil screws up the climate.
Who'd a thunk that this would be a subject that would generate so much interest and so many responses...but that's a good sign of the kind and degree of the typical boingboing reader.
Anyone interested whether you're sceptical or not, might want to check out iconoclastic polymath Thomas Gold's perspective on the hot deep biosphere in which he makes quite a few interesting points. He has a wiki...As for the primary reason why we might think that oil and gas are the result of decaying plankton, that they're typically found in rocks bearing fossil evidence; Dr Gold points out that the oil and gas has to be trapped and sediments filled with granular and partially hollow shells is an idea material to act as a reservior, and even oil exploration geologists don't actually believe that the oils source was the rocks in which deposits occur.
Anyhow, fascination subject...thanks for brining it up.
I've looked into this before and while there are some intriguing questions it also has to said these alternative theories sometimes have the discreet backing of established oil corporations, ie. any way to sow doubt to stave off finding new energy thus causing their decline. So some entertaining -whatifs- but always look hard at the provenance. Some more open and independent research is needed.
However for lots of reasons oil based economies are bad for the environment and bad geopolitically, regardless of where it comes from better (and more democratically de-centralised) ways of producing energy are required. Although bacterial production in your back yard would require leaps in tech to use it with less polluting results. We will need oil for plastics for ages but it would be better to stop its fuel use as soon as possible.
(1) of course. Oil (can) come from algae.
http://oakhavenpc.org/cultivating_algae.htm