what is oil, anyway?
Here’s a question i’ve wondered about myself. It seems unlikely that there were that many dinosaurs or layers of algae piled up over the millenia in just the right conditions to create lakes of oil underground. Here’s a short, interesting discussion of the idea that it’s either abiogenic in origin (according to the Russians), or generated by bacteria. You’d think that after 100+ years of oil research that we’d have a better answer to this. It’s sort of a core question in the whole peak oil debate.
Between this and the recent bacteria-powered batteries, it looks more and more like the next wave of tech advances are going to come from some of our tiniest co-habitators. How dumb will we look for the whole antibacterial soap thing when we’re embracing and farming bacteria as a way of life?
I love the whole idea of science coming full circle, that the more we learn about our planet, plants and animals, the more solutions we find right under our noses (or in them, as the case may be). Our future might indeed not be a computerized, mechanized world, but a world that looks much simpler and more agrarian than we have had in centuries.
4 Responses to “what is oil, anyway?”
Oh, leave it to you learned scholars to shoot holes in perfectly good wacko theories!
It may not prove to be a wacko theory in the long run. Who knows! Of course, the more important point is that whether oil is abiogenic or not, new discoveries peaked years ago, and known reservoirs don’t seem to be refilling themselves on a time-scale convenient to us.
I find the idea that oil is generated by bacteria far more interesting than the abiogenic version. That gives us something to hang on to - imagine the adverts for cars running on e-coli!
The wikipedia article on petroleum does a pretty good job of explaining the biogenic model that I learned in my undergrad geology coursework and field studies. As far as I know, the source-reservoir-trap model is the primary paradigm for locating potential oil resources. The abiogenic theory doesn’t explain why the oil is where it is and isn’t where it isn’t, and I never heard of it in my formal training in geology.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petroleum