Oil comes from What???

Question

I know that we are taught that coal is fossiles of plants etc. that died billions and billions of years ago. No they also say that oil is the remains of dinosures etc. How then can it be explained that crude oil , in the gulf of mexico is miles and miles and miles BELOW the ocean floor. How did the surface, get so far below ground.

Answer 1

In the gulf, there are tens of thousands of feet of sediment that pile up from the rivers such as the Mississippi. This is thought by some to result in oil after pressure and temperature convert it. I think a better explanation is offered by Thomas Gold, a deep hot biosphere. Most geologists believe that the cold accretion theory of the formation of the earth fits the evidence best. Comets and gas that formed the earth contained hydrocarbons much of which was methane. After the earth formed, methane seeped from many of the cracks and worked its way up. It encountered deep methanotrophic bacteria which converted much of the methane to petroleum. As an experiment, they drilled miles down in a granite fractured by a meteor. It turned out they found lots of oil, but there was so much bacteria, that the wells got clogged. Methane on earth is almost always thought to be biological in origin yet on Titan where there are rivers of it, it is obviously abiogenic. Clearly, geology needs to reassess this theory. Russian geologist accept the abiogenic formation as more plausible.

Clearly, oil is not from dinosaurs in any measurable way. Generally dinosaurs get consumed and recycled as do most plants and animals. The amount of methane hydrate and the amount of carbonate rocks seems to indicate a constant source of carbon for billions of years. The biologic theory cannot account for this. For those that don't know exactly how the theory of the formation of oil, the way I learned it, it requires a shale where clay minerals form pockets where pressure can build. They needed to come up with something to account for the additional pressures required. Anyway, I think the abiogenic is far more elegant and requires less contortions in logic but like all old theories it will die hard. Another interesting thing about this theory is that it indicates numerous deeper oil reservoirs as wells a providing a theory for the formation of gas and high grade coal deposits. Coal and gas are often associated with oil and high grade coal is probably formed from methane as well.

Answer 2

You're right, oil is orgainic remains from millions of years ago, but not just dinosaurs Oil can form anywhere.There are organisms that live in the ocean as well. Their remains can also form oil.
The most important part of finding oil is finding rock formations that can hold the oil and contain it. All ancient remains can become oil but we can only find it if the oil is stored up by special rock formations.
The earth does not look the same as it did millions of years ago. A process called plate tectonics causes the crust of the earth to shift and change. It's a slow process but over millions of years it can make huge differences. So places that were once above ground can become below ground.

Answer 3

Organic material - mostly algae is buried with sediment to form thick shale beds in the deep Gulf of Mexico. As this shale is buried more and more deeply it heats up due to geothermal heat flow from the earth's interior. At or about 100*C The lipid-rich cell walls of the algae begin to transform into what we know as hydorcarbons - oil and natural gas. Oil does not come from dead dinosaurs. At a certain point and pemperature the oil is expelled fron the shale and migrates to porous sandstone and limestone reservoirs.

Answer 4

Aside from the natural erosion and redistribution of dirt,
several million years of nature and plate tectonics is how and the gulf of mexico is not miles and miles deep. the deepest point in our oceans is the Challenger Deep close to Australia.

The maximum surveyed depth of the Challenger Deep is 10,923 meters (35,838 feet) or 6.7875 miles. (National Geographic puts the depth at 11,034 meters (36,201 feet ) below sea level.
as far as the gulf of mexico, that part of the world used to be above ground and located close to africa. due to continental drift and shelf movements however, it moved along with north and south america to the location they are at currently. this happened for the last 750 million years.
here is a link.
http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/geology/tectonics.html

during the mesozoic era (the time of the dinosaurs) all of the continents were connected and it would have been possible for them to get to the area of the gulf that is now underwater and some of them inevitably died there. not to mention all of the sea dwelling prehistoric creatures who lived in the waters off the coast. their bodies will eventually be the crude that we drill to and harvest from the earth now.

when two continental shelves collide one is pushed on top and the other is pushed underneath. this is how mountains and deep sea trenches are formed. through this method it is possible for the bodies of the dinosaurs to be pushed far underground. you also have an ice age that has happened since the era of the dinosaurs. that ice age completely changed the surface of the earth.

there are also the remains of all of the plant and animal life that lived before the era of the dinosaurs. life has been on this planet for over 750 million years and the dinosaurs were alive only 65 million years ago, that is alot of time for things to die be covered by nature, moved by the continental shelf, compressed by pressure and turn into oil.

knowing all of this it is not hard to understand how the oil that we drill for is now buried underground in places that are now underwater.

Answer 5

Together with natural gas, it makes up petroleum, which is Latin for "rock oil". Petroleum is basically a mix of naturally occurring organic compounds from within the earth that contain primarily hydrogen, carbon and oxygen. When petroleum comes straight out of the ground as a liquid it is called crude oil if dark and viscous, and condensate if clear and volatile. When solid it is asphalt, and when semi-solid it is tar. There is also natural gas, which can be associated with oil or found alone.

Crude oil comes in many forms. Usually it is black, but green, red or brown oils are not uncommon. Thin and volatile oils are called "light", whereas thick and viscous ones are "heavy". Light oils have an API gravity of 30 to 40 degrees, which means that the density is much less than 1.0 g/cc. These oils float easily on water. By contrast, some heavy oils have an API gravity of less than 12 degrees and are so dense that they sink, rather than float, in water.

Most oils are mixtures of many different compounds, most of which are hydrocarbons. There are four main hydrocarbon groups in petroleum. The saturates are hydrocarbons consisting of straight chains of carbon atoms. Aromatics are hydrocarbons consisting of rings of carbon. Asphlatenes are complex polycylic hydrocarbons that contain many complicated carbon rings, and NSO compounds are mostly nitrogen, sulfur, and oxygen.

Answer 6

oil comes from dead vegetation and animals as well, that are as you have said billions of years old, this still holds true.
how the oil got so far underground, well it starts out as a Pete bog and hundreds of years the bog is covered by sediments form water, and slit. also mountain erosion and more dead animals and vegetation and all that pressure causes the the plant matter along with the decaying animal flash to be pressed together and other sediments cover the area over the centuries it buried even further underground until the plant and animal matter liquefies that is how it got so far underground.

Answer 7

Oil isn't all from dinosaurs. Its also from plant life and other types of organic matter including diatoms and algae (tiny organisms that live in the ocean). So things that died in the ocean and then settled to the bottom and were buried over the course of millions of years become oil.

Answer 8

First off, not all land has been above water all the time, some areas have bcome submerged (not the gulf). Secondly, there are other prehistoric creatures that have did live in the oceans and have died there. their bodies become burried and over millions of year, whala! you got oil.