Could some one please explain to me exactly what gasoline is made up of?
I have always been under the impression that it was made out of dead dinosaurs and such.
The reason I ask:
There’s a vegan at my school who loves to tell people how wrong it is to consume animals, be it as food or clothing or whatever.
and yet, gas is ok, I assume, as she has a car.
and while I’d love to point this out, I think its best that I wait til I have ‘the straight dope’. For all I know, gas could be made up of plants exclusively.
thanks!
I don’t know anything “true” about vegans (only what other people say), but I think I could safely assume that vegans wouldn’t be opposed to fossil fuels (regardless of their origin) on the grounds that we (as humans) aren’t exploiting living creatures. After all, unless you believe the Earth is only 6,000 years old, all the dinosaurs died before we realized we could make gasoline from their corpses.
Crude oil came from marine and terrestrial plant life that was alive several hundred million years ago, as many of the components of crude oil can be traced back to leaf waxes and similar molecules found in plants.
To expand a bit on Caldazar’s post, the majority of oil and gas originates in so-called source rocks, mostly marine sediments with a total organic carbon content of up to about 10%, laid down up to several hundred million years ago. In general, lighter oils and natural gas very gradually leach out of the source rocks and migrate under heat and pressure to more porous reservoir rocks, where they can be extracted through drilling processes.
Crude oil is made up of literally hundreds of different types of naturally-ocurring hydrocarbon (carbon-hydrogen) compounds. Once crude oil has been extracted, a refining process separates these compounds by molecular weight into different products such as gasoline, diesel, kerosene, etc. Gasoline is simply one group of specific hydrocarbon compounds, at the lighter end of the hydrocarbon spectrum.
As both source and reservoir rocks tend to be of marine origin, it is generally assumed that the bulk of the crude oil found cames from organic compounds found in the bodies of microscopic marine life. Commercial quantities of oil and gas are relatively rare in non-marine sediments, and almost non-existant in non-sedimentary rocks.
Dinosaurs really have very little to do with oil and gas, except that they lived during the time frame when considerable amounts of the source rocks were formed. OTOH, they make for much better visuals than a subsea rain of dead plankton.
BTW, doesn’t your school library have any info on this?
So, gasoline is the decomposed remains of dead organisms, some of which were animals. Keep in mind that much of the biomass in the ocean is microscopic and plant-like. The percentage of petroleum that comes from the remains of muticellular animals is likely very small.
Nope. It is being formed, but it takes a very, very, very, very long time to become useful. Well, in human terms anyway. If you are living geologicaly, then just wait a few hours and you have instant oil!
Just as new coal is being created continuously, and existing lower ranks of coals and coal-like substances (peat, lignite, brown coal, etc) are moving slowly up the ranking to become sub-bituminous, bituminous, and anthracite.
Oh, Catmandu, you’re being silly. EVERYONE knows that the 4002 Mustang will run off of a Gravitational Hyperfusion Reactor Core, using Pertribillium Tricoillon Extract as fuel, which will allow it to have 8 trillion trillion trillion trillion horsepower and a maximum top speed of 7 billion times the speed of light.
Anachronism, is this the first time you’ve seen a post by Anthracite? She chose that name because she’s an expert on coal-fired power plants, and incidentally fossil fuels in general. It’s hardly surprising to see her posting in a thread on her area of expertise.
