Sunday 12 February 2023

'Fossil' or 'Mineral' Oil

Building on our hosts demolition of the 'CO2 is a pollutant and causes global warming' argument it is becoming increasingly clear that the widely held belief that crude oil as extracted is a fossil fuel is also nonsense, or less combatively, highly improbable.  And that there is no scarcity of it.

It is a Widely Held Belief that the maximum depth for fossils is about 16,000 feet down. Yet crude oil has been extracted at depths of over 30,000 feet. How did it get there?

I also found some research that made the assertion that crude oil was a mineral that is constantly being synthesised abiotically by the Earth's magma layer.  In fact, a lot of the time, people do refer to oil as a 'mineral' oil.  

There is also some comment that oil was only classified as a 'fossil fuel' (despite it not having any 'O' in it) under the influence of Rockerfeller who wanted to maintain its scarcity value.

What's more, BP recently reported (lost the link) that new technology had enabled them to double their forecast reserves.

All of which implies that crude oil, mineral oil, is super-abundant.

Thoughts anyone?


6 comments:

Doonhamer said...

97 percent of climatologist astronomers state that computer models show that our solar system outer giant planets and some of their satellites were covered in dense jungle.
The evidence is in the present ginormous quantity of fossil fuel covering their surfaces.

Bayard said...

The word "fossil" covers anything dug up, not necessarily something that was once alive, which is its more specialised common usage.

fossil (n.)
1610s, "any thing dug up;" 1650s (adj.) "obtained by digging" (of coal, salt, etc.), from French fossile (16c.), from Latin fossilis "dug up," from fossus, past participle of fodere "to dig," from PIE root *bhedh- "to dig, pierce."

Restricted noun sense of "geological remains of a plant or animal" is from 1736 (the adjective in the sense "pertaining to fossils" is from 1660s); slang meaning "old person" first recorded 1859. Fossil fuel (1833) preserves the earlier, broader sense.

I think it is simple ignorance of the etymology of the word that has led to a process of folk-etymology producing the idea that fossil fuels were once living organisms.

That there are more hydrocarbons under the ground than was first thought is undeniable, but that they are not a limited resource seems very unlikely.

Lola said...

B. I did not mean that hydrocarbons got by drilling were unlimited. But they are like iron ore, superabundant. And we can ourselves synthesise hydrocarbon fuel, i.e. there is no effective limit to their availability.

mombers said...

So the Chinese, Japanese, Indians have not exploited these abundant hydrocarbons why? All of these major economies are highly dependent on oil imports, you'd think they would have figured out to just drill a bit deeper and find the real stuff, no? I'm guessing whether it's there or not, it's not nearly as economical as the stuff that gushes in other parts of the world to extract

Derek said...

Hydrocarbons actually are unlimited. It's just a question of how much energy it takes to extract them. Drilling for them will stop when the amount of energy required to extract them from the ground is greater than the amount of energy required to synthesise them from atmospheric carbon dioxide.

So as mombers says it's all a question of cost: we choose the cheapest source. Currently that's still underground somewhere on the planet. However it won't always be so. And when there's more money to be made by using solar or nuclear energy to extract hydrocarbons from the air, that will be our source.

Lola said...

Derek. Eggsaktly