Re: How many dinosaurs did it take to make a barrel of oil? - The Straight Dope or “How many dinosaurs does it take to make a barrel of petroleum”
This article was published in 1986 and advised that a well being drilled in Sweden will test the theory that petroleum comes from the interior of the earth, not from decomposition of biological matter.
Are they still drilling ? What did they find ? Cecil, can we have an update please
No, they are not still drilling and they found absolutely nothing. However, it seems the idea is not dead and there is a new bunch of enthusiasts who want to start drilling again.
By golly I remember that! The scientist leading the Swedish drilling project was interviewed on the radio one day when I was driving somewhere in 1986. His theory as best I can recall was that drilling through silicon domes would find oil. Fascinating but no internet in those days and I forgot all about it. Cool.
Incidentally I’m not sure if scientists actually know how oil is created. Coal - no problem - Carboniferous Period. But oil is much younger and may be produced by bacteria in the Earths crust. Happy to be corrected.
The vast weight of evidence so far supports a biomass origin of oil, coal and natural gas. The main driving force these days behind the “Abiotic oil” idea is from creationists, for obvious motivations. And regardless of any truth or fiction behind the idea, when you get a major group who works from a conclusion first . . . then looking for evidence to support the conclusion they’ve already made? Shaky ground for rational research.
Isn’t this how global warming research began?
No.
And it’s not just creationists who want abiotic oil to be true. There are also fossil fuel companies who use that discredited hypothesis to justify massive exploitation of resources: Pump all we want, the Earth will make more.
I’ve called this to Cecil’s attention, to see if he thinks an update is warranted. Thnx.
My children, who are barely smart enough to watch Jeopardy, they told me this and my asnwer was that’s a lot of dinasours.
Not to mention most of them lived in Texas, Long Beach, Iran, Saudi, and even now Israel has oil.
I had to really laugh out loud and now I still don’t have an answer for them, bummer :smack:
Okay guys, this answer is wrong on so many levels I hardly know where to start. Credentials first - I have worked for an oil company for almost 34 years now as an explorationist, so I know a little about the process. Oil comes from 2 primary sources - and this has been well confirmed by geochemistry - algae and terrestrial plant material. Algae generally cooks into oil given time, heat, and pressure, and then cracking to gas if the heat gets high enough, or even to CO2 eventually. Plant material (think coal) usually cooks directly to gas, mostly skipping the oil step. You get very organic rich shales deposited in anoxic ocean basins (upwards of 10% carbon content), which then turn into hydrocarbons over millions of years. No dinosaurs, sorry. Their biomass would be inconsequential, and they would be unlikely to be buried in the right environment. As far as Gold’s hypothesis, I’m more sympathetic than most earth scientists since my degree is in Astrophysics, but still, the isotopes are all wrong. Isotopic analysis of oils & gases from wells match isotopes from living beings, with rare exception. As to why all the oils in the middle east look similar, it is because there used to be a marine basin covering the area and a single rich source rock was deposited, which then fed all the various reservoirs with the same oil. That is not at all unusual. Same thing in the Gulf of Mexico. 80% of the oil comes from a Jurassic source-rock, about 20% from a Cretaceous source, but there are dozens of different reservoirs of all ages producing the oil because it migrated into the traps through various means. We spend years trying to figure this stuff out in detail.
So, what’s wrong with the answer, then? It admittedly gives more weight to the abiotic hypothesis than it warrants, but that’s prefaced with the statement that it’s just a hypothesis, and a very non-mainstream one at that. And it further states, in the last paragraph, that biotic oil comes from plants, not dinosaurs, just as you state. A difference of emphasis hardly seems like “wrong on so many levels”, to me.
I was listening to an interview on television with a scientist. I wish I had caught more details, like the guy’s name or field of study. But what caught my attention is that he implied that now that we have so many bacteria, no new fossil fuels are in the process of being created. First, that aerobic and anaerobic bacteria break down most all dead animals and plants. And second, that oil-consuming bacteria evolved after all the fossil fuel we could ever have was produced. Any “New” fossil fuel would be consumed by these bacteria.
For quite a few reasons, I don’t quite buy this. But the interview went right on as if he had not mentioned this.
Does anyone know who this might have been, whether he might be right, or anything he might have written that might be worth my time to read?
I remember hearing that Swedish well being referenced in the Teaching Company’s lecture series on abiogenesis by Robert Hazen. He said that the well produced a small amount of oil - not nearly enough to convince skeptics, but juuust enough to keep the proponents convinced and still pushing for further work.
The column is from ’86, when the abiotic hypothesis was hot news. It’s gone a bit musty since then.
Regardless of how you feel about creationists, isn’t this just how a lot of science is done? Take the search for the Higgs Bosun for example - they’ve got a model they’d like to test, they invest heavily in a huge machine which they use to look for evidence.
Whilst there is certainly a lot of science that comes from a “study data, come up with theory that fits the fact” model, it seems that I read about a lot of ideas that come up from a “Come up with theory that seems to fit, then come up with ways to test it” approach.
Yes, but “come up with ways to test it” means “come up with ways to disprove it”, not “come up with ways to support it.” This is one of those bright lines that separate science from pseudoscience. The latter says things like “well, here are some ways this could be true” (see young earth creationism and homeopathy), whereas the latter says things like “well, we’ve failed in every attempt to prove it untrue,” which is a much stronger statement.
Figure how how much oil you can get out of an average sized sperm whale and you probably have a rough idea of how much you could get out of a sauropod. Of course, that oil would be long gone by now and has nothing to do with petroleum, but if you wanted a good approximation that would probably do.
I think is the lubricant for all of the plates in the center of the earth, not from dinosaurs.
Put there by the Great Lubricator.
Yes, I’m sure those scientists sat at the bottom of the mines with their dark matter detectors are desperate to go through another year without detecting anything.
As I said, I know a lot of science is as you say, but to pretend that scientists don’t try and construct experiments to prove their theories is nonsense.
It may seem that I’m trying to defend creationistic pseudoscience here, which I’m not. The difference is not (in this particular case) in the methods, so much as the reaction to the results.
I guess what I’m trying to say is that if respected scientists came up and supported the idea of abiotic oil, they would go about testing for it in a similar way to what the creationists are funding.