Can anyone explain to me how the remains of dinosaurs & algi was responsible for creating the worlds oil>?

Question

And how did it get 5+ miles deep below the earth. How does biorganic material degrade into a higher form of material such as oil. And if so why does'nt the remains of my relatives turn into a mini oil field for me?

Is there conclusive proof of this process, and who dreampt up the theory,

Im confused..

Answer 1

The only fact in your question is that you are confused.

Oil fields are not typically 5 miles below the surface and if they were, oil would cost a lot more. They are actually quite shallow in geological terms. Ghawar, the world's largest oil field is producing mostly from 7000 feet depth:

http://goliath.ecnext.com/coms2/gi_0199-7012756/SAUDI-ARABIA-The-Arab-Light.html

Below oil is natural gas.

Oil is by no means a "higher form" of material. That is not only scientifically but also naively false. Oil conists of simple linear and cyclic hydrocarbons with a few hundred atomic units of mass while living beings are composed of macromolecules with thousands and millions of atomic units of mass. Oil just happens to burn better than water containing organisms which it came from. If you try to light a freeze dried piece of food, you will find that dehydrated "living beings" burn quite well.

As for the mystery of how oil was produced:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyrolysis

Add a little bit of hydrogen and the right catalysts and you get synthetic crude from organics. Add some more hydrogen and you get it from coal... i.e. pure carbon. It's called Fisher-Tropsch synthesis:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fischer-Tropsch_process

No big deal. Germany ran on that stuff after the Allies cut them off from oil fields.

So what makes you think nature can't do in millions of years what man can do in minutes? Shall we call it religious convictions or just missing information? The latter can be changed, but I am afraid that we still do not have a way to make realists out of true believers.

Answer 2

simplified answer. organic remains get buried in sediment. There is usually a few wt% on average organic material in sediments. As sedimentation continues, the sediment gets deeper and deeper in the pile. The pile also sinks deeper from its own weight, making room above for more sediment to keep accumulating.

Pressure and temperature increase. Increasing pressure and temperature causes reactions in the organic remains, converting them into other substances including gases, liquids, and solids.

There is proof that various aspects of this theory can and do occur. the chemical reactions can be reproduced. The earth's crust definitely sinks under weight (glaciers do this, for example). The organic content of sediments has been measured a ridiculous number of times (heck, even I have done some), giving us a good idea of the variations possible. Other geochemical signatures also show us what reactions have been proceeding in the crust.

No one person came up with the idea, it was developed from the work of numerous scientists over many years.

Your mom and dad are mostly water so the amount of oil they would produce under the proper circumstances is trivial. you need a lot of moms and dads (actually animals are a minor portion of the total biomass and thus most of the oil is not made from dead animals, but rather from dead plants)

Answer 3

It isn't. Most of the world's oil came from simple sea creatures (called radiolaria, if I remember correctly). These creatures spend a certain amount of their sunlight energy producing a kind of vegetable oil so as to maintain their position in the water column. Upon dying, they fall to the sea floor and collect. Overlying sediments then compact them and, along with heat an pressure they are converted to petroleum. Plant life compacts into peat, and eventually turns into coal. Dinosaurs have nothing to do with petroleum, natural gas or coal.

Answer 4

It's pretty clear that oil is formed from organic material, whether plants or animals or both. It is carbon based, like most life forms. It is a very long proccess, it also produces natural gas. Some landfills capture gas from rotting underground garbage and use the gas to produce electricity. It could be buried deep from eons of earthquakes, storms, and dust.

Answer 5

http://www.priweb.org/ed/pgws/systems/energy_capture/capture.html