|
|
Posted by David Sherman [216.18.131.116] on Wednesday, February 24, 2010 at 12:57:28 :
In Reply to: Re: Grandson Thing posted by copey [206.80.249.246] on Wednesday, February 24, 2010 at 10:16:03 :
Well, if oil is so plentiful, why aren't we all pumping our own? The dinosaur "theory" was never something geologists believed. Maybe people got it from the logo on the Sinclair gas stations. The real theory is that it came from decomposed swamp muck and dead stuff sinking to the bottom of the ocean, and then getting mildly squeezed and cooked over the years. Even now, you'll find some natural oil scum on swamp sometimes, just like you find swamp gas bubbling up from it. As for how it got so deep: "time". There are tiny marine fossils associated with most oil-bearing rock, even when it's extremely deep, which means that rock had to be on the top of the seabed once.
I know there's a theory of "abiotic" oil out there that says that the oil actually was formed by chemical processes from the methane that is common throughout the universe. That theory also says that there's a vast amount of methane deep underground that no one has tapped into yet, and the gas fields we exploit are just little bits of it that have seeped further up and gotten trapped in rocks that we can get to. It all sounds fine in theory, and there's no way to positively disprove it.
The trouble is that people have been drilling for this "abiotic" oil and gas for quite a while now and no one has found any of it. The Russians were really into it, they didn't have to contend with supposed capitalist oil company conspiracies, and they could afford serious drilling equipment, and yet they never found any either. So far, prehistoric swamp juice is still the best theory, but anybody with any other theory is welcome to drill a hole in the ground and test it out.
Follow Ups: