> 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.