How long does the earth take to make oil
Millions of years ago, algae and plants lived in shallow seas. After dying and sinking to the seafloor, the organic material mixed with other sediments and was buried. Over millions of years under high pressure and high temperature, the remains of these organisms transformed into what we know today as fossil fuels. Today, petroleum is found in vast underground reservoirs where ancient seas were located. Petroleum reservoirs can be found beneath land or the ocean floor. Crude oil is usually black or dark brown, but can also be yellowish, reddish, tan, or even greenish.
When will fossil fuels run out?
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American civilization as we know it appeared to be in grave peril a quarter century ago. When Arab nations cut off oil shipments to the United States during the war in the Middle East, gasoline prices abruptly rose 40 percent and panic ensued.
Motorists idled in long lines at gas stations, where creeping tensions led to fights and even occasional shootings. Automakers scrambled to retool their assembly lines to manufacture miserly compacts rather than gas-guzzling behemoths. Entrepreneurs poured millions into upstart solar-energy and wind-power companies. Politicians pontificated about the need for collective belt-tightening and offered income tax credits to homeowners for energy-saving insulation.
Adjusting for inflation, gasoline is cheaper today than it was before the Arab oil embargo. Indeed, the world seems to be awash in oil. This year, wells around the world — from the sands of Saudi Arabia to the deep continental trench off the coast of Brazil — will pump some 75 million barrels of oil each day to satisfy demand. Barring a worldwide recession, the U. Energy Information Administration believes the world will be consuming around million barrels a day by the year These days a host of innovators is probing for new sources of oil underwater.
Geologists have perfected seismic imaging of seafloor geology, with the hope of tapping into vast new oil fields like the one that lies beneath the Caspian Sea in Kazakhstan.
That region could harbor a staggering billion barrels — making it one of the largest oil basins ever discovered. And drilling companies can now venture well over a mile into the seafloor. Unmanned submarines make the descent, fitted with robotic arms that guide the drill into the seafloor.
The Gulf of Mexico could produce a total of 15 billion barrels, the coast of Brazil 30 billion, and the coast of Angola and elsewhere along West Africa another 30 billion — totaling some 75 billion barrels. That prize has prompted oil companies to spread the risk of discovery among themselves.
Chevron, working with a consortium of other oil companies, recently drilled an exploration well in the Gulf of Mexico in waters 7, feet deep, a distance five times the height of the Empire State Building. The foot Glomar Explorer, a former CIA vessel built during the Nixon administration to recover a Soviet nuclear submarine that sank deep in the Pacific, was converted into a deepwater-drill ship.
And instead of dropping anchor — which is impossible in such depths — the ship hovered over the spot with the help of the global positioning satellite system, which identified the latitude and longitude. First the crew lowered the pipe — 21 inches wide and weighing a million pounds — into the water through a hole in the ship. Once the drill bit reached the seafloor, it bored another 10, feet until it had reached down 17, feet — more than three miles.
But new, larger ships are under construction, and they could lower pipe down to 10, feet, maybe more. Unlike coal, which is widely distributed throughout the world, petroleum is more difficult to find and extract.
Coal forms wherever plants were buried in sediments in ancient swamps, but several conditions must exist for petroleum — which includes oil and natural gas — to form. The first is an accumulation of algae and other microorganisms in shallow seas, like those that periodically formed as the continents drifted apart and moved together again over hundreds of millions of years. Second, these microorganisms must get trapped in silt, which can happen wherever giant rivers emptied into shallow seas.
Finally, these pools of dead microorganisms must be subjected to the right conditions — say, a temperature of about degrees, under pressure for a few million years. That prolonged pressure-cooking causes chemical reactions that convert proteins, carbohydrates, and other compounds in the material into crude oil.
If the temperature rises to about degrees, the result will be natural gas. No matter where oil is found, it is always a sign that the area once lay at the bottom of a stagnant sea. In the Gulf of California, near the Colorado River delta, researchers pulled up a mud sample and found it laced with petroleum — a sure indication that, somewhere down below, oil is now being formed.
Even the most inhospitable locations are being made drill-friendly. A decade ago, oil was discovered in just over feet of water off the coast of Newfoundland. Because icebergs flow through the area, no ordinary oil platform would work.
Then engineers hired by a group of oil companies designed an iceberg-proof goliath. Its base is a huge pointed star made of , tons of concrete and steel.
The points, which are supposed to deflect and break up icebergs, have not yet actually collided with one. The platform, called the Hibernia, is expected to recover million barrels of oil over 15 to 20 years. Fossil fuels — the hydrocarbons known as peat, coal, oil, and natural gas — are formed from the constituents of deeply buried and preserved organic matter.
They make good fuels because the energy stored in the bonds between carbon and hydrogen is abundant and easy to release in combustion with oxygen. Some hydrocarbons are simpler than others. Coal, for example, is mostly carbon, while petroleum — which includes oil and natural gas — is mostly carbon and hydrogen. Still, crude oil is anything but simple. The lightest— — with the shortest carbon chains — make good motor fuels because they are easily vaporized in engines.
The heaviest hydrocarbons form viscous oil, paraffin, and asphalt. But even the longer carbon chains can be broken up chemically — in a process called cracking — to create fuels made of lighter molecules. Here are some better known hydrocarbons found in crude oil:. All the big oil companies are beginning to tap hard-to-reach deposits by using 3-D seismic imaging and computer-controlled sensors to detect where pockets of oil are located in a well.
Once the well is bored, drill bits can be steered sideways through the ground in search of oil. He most promising copper bullet is new technology for turning natural gas into fuels like gasoline and diesel.
For years, natural gas has been used mostly for generating electricity and fueling kitchen stoves and some home furnaces. But such waste is soon to become a thing of the past. Chemical engineers long ago figured out how to convert natural gas into liquid fuel, but the process was never cost-effective. The South Africans followed suit during the international boycott through the apartheid years.
But now that companies are doing it on a large scale and with better technology, the cost of building a natural gas plant has come way, way down. Most of that gas probably will not be converted to oil. And there may be far more. John Edwards, a former Shell geologist and now an adjunct geology professor at the University of Colorado, believes that underwater deposits of another form of natural gas could raise the total to 5 trillion barrels.
In many parts of the world, the seafloor contains natural gas trapped inside ice crystals called hydrates.
The hydrates can be extracted by lowering a pipe into the ground and drawing up a core of mud and crystals. The problem is that unless the core is properly contained, the change in pressure and temperature at the surface can cause it to explode, says Edwards. The payoff could be huge. The abundance of natural gas could keep the car culture rolling for years.
Chemically known as methane, natural gas is among the simplest molecules on Earth: a single carbon atom surrounded by four hydrogen atoms. Turning it into a liquid requires some coaxing. First, the chemists release the hydrogen from its bonds with carbon by mixing methane with oxygen, throwing in a catalyst, and turning up the heat.
The carbon atoms then form new bonds with the electron-hungry oxygen, creating a mixture of carbon monoxide and hydrogen, called synthesis gas. That gas becomes a building block for the larger molecules of liquid fuels. The next step involves another chemical process to combine the carbon monoxide and hydrogen of the synthesis gas into a complex fuel like gasoline which contains hydrocarbons with as many as eight carbon atoms or heavier products such as kerosene, diesel, and lubricating oil.
The goal is to create strings of carbon that are just the right length and reactive enough to burn easily in engines. Because these larger molecules have a higher boiling point than natural gas, they exist as a liquid. When and if supplies of natural gas begin to run out, the oil companies will focus on squeezing usable fuels out of even more difficult prospects.
Already, the Canadians are starting to mine the tar sands of Alberta, where an estimated billion barrels of oil are trapped. And Venezuelans are beginning to excavate the solid tarry deposits of the Oronoco sludge belt, which contains as much as 1 trillion barrels of oil. Tapping it and converting it to liquid fuels a process nobody has fully mastered yet could yield a supply lasting a millennium.
This parade of unending innovation makes any worries about impending oil shortages sound unduly pessimistic. Still, not everyone is buying the idea. Sure, we can figure out new ways to extract oil and other fuels, argues Campbell, but the payoff for such technology is a long way off. As he sees it, the age of oil abundance may soon come to a close. The oil runs out. Already, the massive oil discoveries of the s — from Alaska to the North Sea — are nearing their crest of production.
Worse still, he argues, the number of oil finds peaked in the s. Today, one new barrel of oil is found for every four produced. At that point, boosting production among the countries in the Middle East can fill the gap — leaving the world vulnerable once more to an oil embargo. This spring, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Mexico, Algeria, and Norway banded together to shore up prices by slight cuts in oil production.
Campbell argues that these countries could eventually gain a greater control of the market and impose whatever price they please. But they could easily double. An oil-devouring economy has not been good for the planet. The so-called greenhouse gases — mainly water vapor and carbon dioxide — make the planet warm and habitable by trapping solar heat as it radiates back off the Earth. When humans burn hydrocarbons, or fossil fuels, the carbon reacts with oxygen. The result: more heat-trapping carbon dioxide in the air.
Since the beginning of industrialization around , the levels of carbon dioxide have increased from parts per million to about today, says Pieter Tans, of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Originally Answered. But where does oil really come from, and how much is left? still don't know for sure where oil comes from, how long it took to make, or how much there is. But another theory holds that more oil was in Earth from the.
Skip to content. Skip to navigation. Every year-old knows that oil comes from the decomposed remains of dinosaurs, a theory first floated by Russian scholar Mikhailo Lomonosov in
Oil or petroleum is a readily combustable fossil fuel that is composed mainly of carbon and hydrogen , and is thus known as a hydrocarbon.
Fossil fuels coal, oil and gas are finite — consume them for long enough and global resources will eventually run out. Concerns surrounding this risk have persisted for decades.
Oil formation
The world has Of course, nations are finding new oil — meaning that number is rising — but new extraction methods are costly and can pose environmental threats. July 14, According to BP , drivers whose vehicles rely on burning oil have a little more than a half-century to find alternate sources of energy. Or walk.
Extraction of petroleum
By using our site, you acknowledge that you have read and understand our Cookie Policy , Privacy Policy , and our Terms of Service. Earth Science Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for those interested in the geology, meteorology, oceanography, and environmental sciences. It only takes a minute to sign up. We all know that oil is an essentially nonrenewable resource over human time scales. However, I am currently working on an activity for high schoolers that teaches them to predict how long humans can continue extracting oil before running out and what a sustainable rate of extraction would be. To that end, does anyone know roughly how much oil is created each year, in the entire crust, no matter how inaccessible? All that is required for oil to form is a source-rock brought to the right depths in a sedimentary basin and the oil migrating into a host-rock. If it is economically profitable See Footnote it goes into the global reserve calculation. Petroleum Sedimentology Winfried Zimmerle, H.
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Lost in the big news last week -- the race for the Democratic nomination, the reeling U. If estimates are accurate, the Brazilian find would amount to the world's third-largest oil reserve. In comparison, the U. Just what the latest Brazil find dubbed "Sugarloaf " could mean to our oil-ravenous world isn't yet completely clear, but the Associated Press quoted Roger Read, an energy analyst at New York-based investment bank Natixis Bleichroeder Inc.
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Your email address is used to log in and will not be shared or sold. Read our privacy policy. If you are a Zinio, Nook, Kindle, Apple, or Google Play subscriber, you can enter your website access code to gain subscriber access. Your website access code is located in the upper right corner of the Table of Contents page of your digital edition. Sign up for our email newsletter for the latest science news. American civilization as we know it appeared to be in grave peril a quarter century ago. When Arab nations cut off oil shipments to the United States during the war in the Middle East, gasoline prices abruptly rose 40 percent and panic ensued. Motorists idled in long lines at gas stations, where creeping tensions led to fights and even occasional shootings. Automakers scrambled to retool their assembly lines to manufacture miserly compacts rather than gas-guzzling behemoths. Entrepreneurs poured millions into upstart solar-energy and wind-power companies. Politicians pontificated about the need for collective belt-tightening and offered income tax credits to homeowners for energy-saving insulation. Adjusting for inflation, gasoline is cheaper today than it was before the Arab oil embargo.
When did planet Earth become Planet Oil?
The extraction of petroleum is the process by which usable petroleum is drawn out from beneath the earth's surface location. Geologists and geophysicists use seismic surveys to search for geological structures that may form oil reservoirs. The "classic" method includes making an underground explosion nearby and observing the seismic response, which provides information about the geological structures underground. However, "passive" methods that extract information from naturally occurring seismic waves are also used. Other instruments such as gravimeters and magnetometers are also used in the search for petroleum. Extracting crude oil normally starts with drilling wells into an underground reservoir. When an oil well has been tapped, a geologist known on the rig as the "mudlogger" will note its presence. Historically in the United States, in some oil fields the oil rose naturally to the surface, but most of these fields have long since been used up, except in parts of Alaska. Often many wells called multilateral wells are drilled into the same reservoir, to an economically viable extraction rate.
