Oil on another planet?

Question

I know this is a long way off but is it possible for another planet to have oil reserves?
and if so would it be possible to extract it and ship it back safely?

What about natural gas then?

Answer 1

It depends on the definition of oil you want to use and if you want to include moons in the answer. If you simply mean "liquid hydrocarbons" and the use of moons is allowed, then the answer is yes. And there is a source in the solar system: the largest moon of Saturn, called Titan.

Titan's atmosphere (it is the only moon in the solar system with a thick atmosphere) is composed largely of methane, the main constituent in natural gas. It also contains ethane, which has two carbon and six hydrogen molecules (methane has one, and four), and the ethane actually rains down on the surface to form lakes, and probably small seas. The spacecraft Huygens landed on Titan a few years back and returned photographs of the surface (with hydrocarbon rocks!) and a lot of other data.

Can we ever go there and get it? It's unlikely to ever be feasible economically to do so, but it would be possible.

Answer 2

Yes, you are right. It is a long, long way off.

First you have to have a planet which has had vegetation and life forms growing on it for thousands and thousands of years. Those items of vegetation and life have to have died and been covered over by sedimentary changes in the surface of the planet for thousands of years. When compressed under all that sediment for a long enough period of time, they might become oil, and even some of it might become natural gas. So, you have any likely candidate planet like that in mind?

Now the mining, drilling. collection and transportation back to Earth...well that is another matter all of its own. Did you figure on paying a million or more dollars per pound of the oil brought back from Planet X? It would cost many billions of dollars to go to Planet X, do the drilling, bottling or canning, and transport the stuff back
to Earth. So, I do not expect this to become the new
business of the future.

Answer 3

Only if aforementioned planet once had life on it, for a long enough period of time that enough dead biomass accumulated and was buried underground and transformed into oil through geological processes. Otherwise, no. And even then, you get less energy out of the oil (40 MJ/kg) than it takes to lift it into orbit (62 MJ/kg for an Earth-sized planet,) and far less out of it than the energy required to ship it to Earth (arbitrarily huge number of joules per kg., since no planets in this solar system besides Earth could have crude oil in any quantity, so we'd have to raid it from a planet orbiting Alpha Centauri, or something.) The energy cost of transportation can be assigned a dollar/ruble/yuan/credit/whatever value per unit of energy. Whoever ships the oil will tack on the cost of getting it from Alpha Centauri to Earth onto the price she sells that oil for. The result will probably be a single barrel of oil worth more than the GDP of entire nations.

Methane (natural gas) is much the same story. While it can be found in significant quantities in the deep interiors of the icy moons of the outer solar system (a pretty long trip by itself; Saturn's moon Titan would be the best place to launch such a venture, or perhaps cometary bodies, or Kuiper-belt objects. An even longer trip,) but on a rocky, terrestrial planet, it generally requires biological processes to produce it in any quantity (which means another trip to Alpha Centauri.)

So while it is possible, in theory, it would be entirely unfeasible. In the distant future, when/if we colonize planets around other solar systems, any oil/natural gas produced by the colony will be for colonial usage only.

Answer 4

Oil is made from the fossilized remains of dead sealife, plantlife, animals and such, so for oil to be present, the planet must have been able to support life at some point in the past. So while it's not technically impossible, that makes it somewhat unlikely.

Natural gas is something different though, I don't quite remember how that is made but I *think* its presence is not dependent on life being present too. I could be wrong though.

Answer 5

For another planet to have oil, it would have to have had organic life - plants. I guess if there were such a place we might get the oil and bring it back, but the question would be how to transport it without using more energy to get there and back than the oil itself contains. If the moon for instance , (which we can get to and back..sort of), was made of solid diamonds, it is not clear whether it would be economical to bring them back.

There is no question that somewhere there are lots of planets with organic life and probably oil too..... but until someone comes up with the workable transporter beam, we'll have to depend on the Arabs.

Answer 6

Oil is the result of massive heat and pressure on the ancient remains of once living creatures (e.g. prehistoric sea life).

So for another planet to have oil it must have had life on it several million years ago (even if there's no life on it now).

Even if it existed and were possible, the extraction, refining and transportation back to earth would make it virtually pointless - how much fuel would have to be used crossing the vast distances involved?

Answer 7

Oil has never been found but one can never say that oil will never be found. However it would be a huge risk to bring that back to earth. A shuttle will not hold enough oil to make it worth it and due to gravitational pull and rotation plus the risk of asteriods and the fact the this entire idea is fantasy - a direct line would be out of the question.

Answer 8

No it is not possible as in the same way as it is not possible to have an intelligent life on another planet!! I am speaking on the current state of play as we know it. What happens in the future is a completely another question requiring another thread!!

Hope this helps.

Answer 9

It is not possible. Oil is made from millions of dead creatures crushed over millions of years. To get oil you need life and there is no proof of life on other planets. If there was life on Mars there is a slim chance there would be oil.

Answer 10

I would think that would be possible but oil forms from dead plants and animals so the planet would have to be able to sustain life.