Fossils Not Necessary For Oil and Natural Gas

[NJ5]

mrstickball said:

NJ5 said:

ManusJustus said:

NJ5 said:
I will read that later, but as for the hydrocarbons in Titan I thought those were methane, which is known to result from simply joining hydrogen and carbon.


Also... I thought I read somewhere that virtually all the oil that has been found contains biological signatures.

Natural gas and methane are the same thing (CH4).

I hadn't heard about biological signatures, do you have more information on that?

It has been a long time since I read about the "abiotic oil" theories, but I'll try to find some sources later on.

But think about it... if oil and natural gas were truly being formed abiotically in significant quantities, why are they harder and harder to find?

My thoughts would be that they aren't occuring naturally in significant quantities quickly. We're looking at processes that may take a long time to build up in sizable deposits.

As for why deposits are harder and harder to find - it's entirely dependant on the technology of finding deposits. Every year, we develop new technologies to extract deposits from areas that were initially impossible to drill in, or detect. Oil shale is a great example. America has billions of barrels in reserve of it, but doesn't choose to (or wants to) extract it due to economic and environmental reasons.

It's true that technology improves extraction, but oil discoveries and drilling are still much lower than consumption.

Oil shale hasn't been proven to be feasible in terms of oil extraction AFAIK. It can be extracted but not necessarily giving more energy than its extraction consumes.