Where does oil come from?

[Spartacus]

Re: Where does oil come from?

This beautiful video, posted on here before, tells the same story quite well. It puts the timing in context so it also answers your speculation about a very slow rate. Yes, it is occuring today, though the oceans have not become anoxic (lacking oxygen) except in some areas and the temperatures are too cool for the diatoms to grow at the astounding rate that really deposits serious organic matter. Also, the whole food chain in oceans depends on the diatoms - They get eaten by bigger organisms who get eaten by bigger ones yet (almost) ad infinitum so they don't prosper quite the way they did when most of the animal life in the oceans died due to lack of oxygen.

so what you're saying is, "screw the whales, save the diatoms"

[ggirod]

Re: Where does oil come from?

so what you're saying is, "screw the whales, save the diatoms"

Exactly, if we want to get this 50-100 million year oil production show back on the road. I can hardly wait.:rolleyes:

Some whales and even some sharks, by the way, are filter feeders and actually just harvest diatoms and other microscopic critters from the water as they swim. Good work if you can get it.

[KGW]

Re: Where does oil come from?...And where does it go?

Tangentially, this is an interesting point made by a fellow in a newsgroup I subscribe to:

In case this part of David's post seems oblique or hard to understand .
. . the basic deal with refining oil is that via "fractional distilling"
crude oil is heated in the refinery and as the temperature increases and
then cools, the crude oil separates into its constituent parts, each of
which has a different boiling point, one of which is gasoline. To get
the other 60% of products that we need, we still have to make the 40%
that we plan to substitute with electric cars. There's a lot more to
the process of refining that this gross simplification, but that's why
David says we can't get away from making gasoline as long as we are
refining crude oil.

His final comment is also interesting --

>This is a physical issue, not a political one.

Bob Waldrop, Oklahoma City

David F wrote:

>
>
> we would still have to produce the other 3.5 million b/d because we
> still have to produce everything else we need from oil (propane,
> butane, naphtha (petrochemical feedstock), kerosene, jet fuel, diesel,
> fuel oil, asphalt, lubricants, paraffins, solvents, and so forth), and
> oil refining--most importantly--is a co-production process. You simply
> can't stop producing gasoline when you produce everything else you
> want from a barrel of oil--it's basic chemistry.
>