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Is it really a fossil fuel or is it man-made? do we have a finite resource on earth or not? how is there so much? if extracted from underground, how is such a colossal amount being extracted from the beneath the earth with little immediate and major consequences to the environment?

how is there so much?!

Is it really a fossil fuel or is it man-made? do we have a finite resource on earth or not? how is there so much? if extracted from underground, how is such a colossal amount being extracted from the beneath the earth with little immediate and major consequences to the environment? how is there so much?!

(post is archived)

[–] • 6 pts

Is it really a fossil fuel or is it man-made? do we have a finite resource on earth or not? how is there so much?

Oil is abiotic. Just the idea of that many animals all dying at specific geological epochs to give you identifiable deposits is assinine.

It isn't man made. It isn't fossil fuel. It's a substance that forms as a result of time and pressure in certain geological formations. Those formations are being created all the time, so more oil is being created all the time. There may be an argument that consumption can outrun production, but that's true of all resources. The same way sand, or granite, or obsidian form under certain conditions, so do hydrocarbons.

Geologic engineers are hilarious to talk to. They will still parrot the "fossil fuels" line, but all of the methods they use to actually find oil are based on abiotic principles. Some are very, very careful to never say "fossil fuels" and will only refer to hydrocarbons.

if extracted from underground, how is such a colossal amount being extracted from the beneath the earth with little immediate and major consequences to the environment?

Because the amount of hydrocarbon in any location isn't structural to the formation, and isn't a huge amount of the mass. It's like water in a damp sponge. If you squeeze the sponge, you get water out. The sponge doesn't get destroyed by this. It's why fracking has become such an important tech -- it allows you to make the formation more "spongy" so that the oil can be extracted from what was previously solid rock. There's still thousands of feet of solid rock above it, and miles of solid rock below it, and all around it.

how is there so much?!

Because it is abiotic and therefore being created literally everywhere underground. We are only extracting the deposits that are a depths that we have the (current) technology to reach. It's everywhere, just a different depths.

[–] • 3 pts

Good comment.

Just want to add, there is now more known oil reserves than there has been at any other point in history.

[–] • 2 pts

Very interesting take. I never really considered the sponge concept of where oil comes from but it makes sense. Abiotic principles also make a lot of sense after doing some quick five-minute research of what it is. Oil is like groundwater, just a different geological formation. So doesn't this technically make oil organic since it is partly formed of carbon? The "fuel will run out" argument seems pretty strong at the rate at which we're consuming it for almost everything. Nature must surely take a long ass time to pressurize rock and we're sucking at it like it's a coca-cola in the cinema.

[–] • 0 pt

Having carbon in it makes it as organic as a diamond.

[–] • 0 pt

What is interesting about this is the organic method of binding hydrogen to carbon also binds in half that amount in oxygen.

Carbohydrates.

But fuel is a hydrocarbon. No oxygen. Now I know that oxygen reacts and reduces to just about anything. E. g rust. By carbohydrates have already strongly bound the oxygen.

So if fuel derives organically where did the oxygen go?

I'll have to investigate.

[–] • 2 pts

Here's one video to give you a start: https://files.catbox.moe/ytv126.mp4

[–] • 0 pt

I assume this discusses replenishment by way of bacterial life?

[–] • 1 pt

No, if you have more information on the origins of oil I am interested.

[–] • 1 pt (edited )

Not handy I don't. I bet askpoal would be helpful.

Afaik, this theory is readily accepted by Russia. In that oil isn't really a fossil fuel, but a byproduct of bacterial excretion. That given enough time oil wells will themselves simply refill. Though not sure if that's suppose to be a timescale of years, decades, or centuries.

[–] • 0 pt

Alternate-timeline Biden who was an honest man and not senile.

[–] • 1 pt

It's not made of fossils. It's a hydrocarbon, hydrogen and carbon plus heat and pressure create hydrocarbons. Plants take the sun's energy and synthesize both hydrocarbons and carbohydrates. Tar is a hydrocarbon. Synthetic fuels can be made with nuclear power plants. Carbon is everywhere, as is oxygen.

Also the oil companies get a bad rep, and have continually been getting a bad rep from the liberal media since time immemorial. Exaggerating the magnitude of oil spills and their effect on the environment.

[–] • 1 pt

Its one of those truisms of the modern age. Oil company === evil. but that is what the modern world runs on and nobody wants to give that up.

What about the petrodollar and such? is that just artificially restricting oil production to give the illusion that it is finite and scarce in order to strangle and monopolize the economy? Been so busy focusing on jews that i forget about the good ole fashioned conspiracies, i'll have to revisit that one.

[–] • 0 pt

Oil equals evil is no different to take the vaccine or eat plant based diets or nuclear power bad.

Poisoning the well

[–] • -1 pt

It is finite in that it takes energy to extract it, it takes a huge network of transportation that runs on said energy to keep the process running. It is finite in that sense. The petrodollar had nefarious origins however you cannot deny that money represents energy. The money you get for goods and services means you're trading dollars for energy expended to create the goods, or provide the service.

Petroleum and petro byproducts run the world. In GOD we trust, Guns Oil and Drugs.

[–] • 1 pt

Oil now is on par with water and air.

Can't live without them

[–] • 0 pt

It's not the carbon that burns in combustion engines. It's an unwanted waste product typically carbon monoxide.

What we want is hydrogen which the engine mixes with the air to get at the oxygen.

You can run any combustion engine. Diesel or petrol with pure hydrogen.

And you can source hydrogen by heating wood

[–] • 0 pt

It's actually peroxide radicals.

[–] • 1 pt

It's just energy, but oil happens to be a very useful form of energy. It is high-density, which means a little of it goes a long way. It is relatively stable and safe. There is nothing wrong with using more of it. We need to use more energy as a society, a lot more energy, because the more we use, the higher our standard of living. This is a one-to-one relationship. More energy use equals a better life. We aren't going to run out of oil. There is lots of it in the ground.

[–] • 0 pt

As for stability this is because it is only half of a combutable fuel.

Needs lots of o2 to make a reaction.

[–] • 1 pt

There is enough to last another few hundred years at current usage, and we won't need it. Energy sources we cannot even imagine are coming.

--Oil production and refinement changed the entire world, just a bit over 100 years ago. It ain't going nowhere anytime soon, no matter how many faggots cry about the 'environment'.

[–] • 1 pt

The assumption that civilization is always onwards and upwards taking technology with it...

[–] [deleted] • 1 pt

Petroleum is the chemical basis for many many pharmaceuticals. Some of those pharmaceuticals come in pill form. Some of those pills are red. There, I did it.

[–] • 0 pt

So there are lots of angles on where it comes from.

My angle on being Team Elon Musk (at least mostly) is that I can't imagine that its highest and best use is burning it.

[–] • 0 pt

TL:DR We got more than enough oil to last us until we figure out how to suck energy out of the sun.

Most of the oil reserves are dead forests, dried up lakes and massive fungi that covered the landscape (fun fact, the largest living organism is a mushroom that's a bit shy of 2400 acres). They get buried and over time then heat and pressure turn them to oil.

It's possible to synthesize oil but it's generally not worth the energy to do it. It basically shows the same process, but very quickly.

Abiotic oil is currently just a theory, but all life is made of carbon and you can't have life before carbon, so... it makes sense that non-organic oil exists, or can exist.

If abiotic oil is proven to be incorrect, then oil is finite and we will run out in time. Once again, we can make wood oil if all else fails but it's estimated that we've only used 30% of all oil resources known to man. The problem is that you can't suck oil out of the ground, it has to be pushed out. This means that once an oil well is out of pressure (usually natural gas that's dissolved into the oil, the same way C02 is dissolved into a soft drink) the oil is stuck. There's a method of extraction where you can collect the natural gas that comes out of a well and pump it back underground to keep the oil well at a relatively stable pressure. This allows you to collect about 70% of what's in a well, instead of the 20-30% depending on how the well was drilled and maintained. Taking the same process further, you could then pump water into the ground, the water will repressurize the well, just like the natural gas, but the oil will also float to the top. The issue with that however is that water is far more valuable than oil, we just... take it for granted. Salt water can be used, but salt water fucks with machinery really bad.

While Solar power is kinda hippy bullshit, it has the most potential and people are actively working on it. It's estimated that the sun puts out approximately 4,000,000 tons of energy per second. The world consumes about 97 million barrels per day (about 14,550,000 tons). If we could create a dyson sphere around the sun, it would take less than 4 seconds to fuel the entire planet for the rest of the day. There are many problems with solar but the most basic is that it requires oil to gather and combine materials to make them. It takes approximately 7 years for the average solar panel to become carbon neutral. Another major issue with solar power is that you need batteries to store it, since... surprise surprise, once the sun goes down, your power is out. Batteries of course take more oil to gather and combine materials.

[–] • 0 pt

Minor correction.

Fossil fuels. Dead plants etc. under lakes produces coal.

It takes shallow oceans to produce oil.