Does Oil Come from Dinosaurs?
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The beauty of this piece is that it breaks down just how much primordeal biomass goes into producing the oil (and coal and gas) we burn today, and how much ancient time is represented in each present year of consumption. (It's millions.)
I've submitted this numerous times to HN with little uptake, most recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27827505
- The fossil fuels burned in a year represent about 400 years' worth of accumulated ancient biomass. That is, you'd need to capture all the biomass grown for four centuries to give the fuel we consume in one year.
- But conversion and preservation aren't perfect. So it took five million years to form just the oil we consume annually (or did in 1997, though values have remained reasonably constant since). That is, only about 0.008% of ancient biomass was stored as petroleum.
I don't know the figures for carbon-cycle sequester and release rates, though at best we're looking at centuries to remove what we've put into the atmosphere in decades, if not longer.
Coal/oil deposits that we are using up now formed because at the time there was no bacteria that could digest dead plant/plankton matter.
This is also why all coal/oil deposits are very old. There is very little deposits after bacteria has evolved.
Nowadays there needs to be special circumstances for a piece of biological matter to not be digested by bacteria. For example it would have to be covered by permafrost or drown in oxygen-deficient lake for a very, very long time and then covered by soil.
I think energy is least of problems. At the beginning forests provide a lot of energy and would be enough to bridge to industrial times (at least for us).
The real issue, I think, is lack of easily available raw materials like iron, tin, copper, etc. We have depended A LOT on iron practically lying on the ground.
Without having some iron easily available any startup civilization wouldn't know to look deeper and even if they wanted, they would not have any tools to do so.
At least with energy there is multiple ways to acquire it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ore_genesis
Useful ore deposits tend to be vast, with absoutely immense amounts (many trillions tons) of paydirt. The value of ores are that the minerals of interest are concentrated, sometimes to very high levels (50% or more of total material), though increasingly lower-grade ores (1% concentration or lower) are utilised. This means that you've got to move 99 units of mass for every unit of primary mineral extracted (overburden).
Even very large human formations are small by geological standards. The World Trade Centre towers contained about 200,000 tonnes of steel. That's a lot for humans, but a minuscule amount on a geological scale. (https://hypertextbook.com/facts/2004/EricChen.shtml)
Current iron ore extraction is on the order of about 2.5 billion tons/year. That's roughly 1/3 ton per person on Earth.
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/all-the-worlds-metals-and-m...
Vaclav Smil's Making the Modern World goes into depth on material use in contemporary civilisation:
https://www.worldcat.org/title/making-the-modern-world-mater...
(After water and oil, sand and gravel are our most-used material, then concrete and iron/steel.)
Then there’s the question of how much of the steel will still be usable when it’s time to extract it. That’s a variable problem depending on how long the ‘dark age’ is before people are rebuilding I suppose. It could be like Doctorow’s Walkaway where there’s abundant enough discarded resources you can almost achieve post-scarcity (but that world never wen through a hard crash it was more building a parallel society than a whole new one). Or it could be centuries later when a lot of the steel will be rust. Hard to say.
This roughly suggests to me, for whatever reason, there is no longer circumstances for new deposits to form.
A problem with just spreading this out on beaches and the like is that these rocks are also often enriched in nickel vs. the average crustal rock, and this would release many millions of tonnes of nickel into the environment. There is some evidence that nickel release was part of the terrible events at the Permian-Triassic extinction. Nickel is crucial to the enzymes in the metabolic pathways leading to the production of methane in anaerobic environments. There's an idea that nickel injection into the oceans by fallout from the PT megaeruption in Siberia led to massive methane production.
This is (mostly) a non-sequitur to any modern discussion about climate, the atmosphere, and its effects on human life and civilization.
Life, at this point is used to a particular equilibrium. Sure, life has existed at different equilibriums. But we also know when those equilibriums are massively disturbed (via a great oxygenation event, massive asteroid, major volcanic eruptions, etc.) much of the life dies out (obviously depends on the intensity of the disruption) and it takes many years for life to adjust to and make a new equilibrium.
Humanity should be deeply concerned with how deeply we have disrupted the equilibrium, as this disrupts the world and biosphere that sustains us.
It might be useful if you're building an argument that humanity will be better off after the current mass extinction event is over. However, I tend to find this point more often leads to a George Carlin-esque cynicism and nihilism about earth being better off without humans (or human civilization) anyways.
“Carbon dioxide concentrations have varied widely over the Earth's 4.54 billion year history.”:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide_in_Earth%27s_...
Sequestering is a process where carbon becomes unavailable for biological processes.
So you have carbon circulating (present in biomass, returned to atmosphere, then back to biomass, etc.) and you have carbon that is not available for circulation.
Carbon in atmosphere is part of circulation. When a supervolcano erupts and emits a bunch of CO2, this adds carbon to atmosphere but then that carbon may very quickly be bound in biomass (for example algae, forests, etc.) This doesn't mean it is sequestered. The algae can die and ferment and forests can burn, releasing CO2 back to atmosphere.
Earth has ability to very quickly bind large amounts of CO2 from atmosphere, true.
But it does not have ability to sequester it, because as long as the carbon is present in biomass, that biomass can burn or rot and change to methane/CO2.
Current coal, oil and gas deposits are due to the fact that at early stages of evolution there was no bacteria that could process some parts of biomass. For example, plants rather than rot would just be covered with more plants and become coal deposits.
Today, it is not possible to form new coal or oil deposits, because any biomass would be quickly digested/fermented/rotted before it could be sequestered.
Have you ever been in a coal mine?
Coal deposits can be very thick and can consist of practically pure coal with very little anything else.
Our densest forests if suddenly "pushed" (I guess covered by ash or anything else, without loosing carbon) would be millimeters in width.
(Not my area of expertise.)
Yes I've been in a coal mine. What a strange stat check.
There is a huge amount of sequestered carbon in such landforms. I don't know how that compares with primordial carbon formations.
One factor that seems to have been significant in the formation of the coal belt that runs from the present-day Czech republic through Germany, France, northern Spain, England, and the Apallachians is that this was a region of forest and/or swampland adjacent to mountains (the Appalachians, which are literally older than dirt), with the swamps sinking rapidly into a shallow seabed. That may also have played a major role in depriving the biomass of oxygen which would permit it to rot.
My own rampant speculation: even given decomposers capable of breaking down woody plant tissue, it's possible that these were insufficiently numerous, or inefficient, or otherwise limited, in ways that aren't currently relevant, such that decomposition is more efficient and rapid today.
Interesting questions. Unlikely to be answered by any of us here soon.
TL;DR: coal, oil, and gas and/or the strata in which they form contain fossils and chemical signatures of ancient plant life, and are found in zones (ancient marshes/forests for coal, ancient shallow seabeds for oil) which correspond to a biotic rather than abiotic origin.
The mantle exists at depths too great for fuel formation --- the materials would be broken down at the temperatures and pressures found. Kerogenesis is depth-limited on the same basis.
Do you not have a desktop / laptop on which you could read the article later?
Just my own view, but I find that highly-recommended PDFs are often vastly more worthwhile reading than much of what is easily found in HTML format.
My preferred platform is generally an e-ink reader or tablet. At 8" or larger, they're quite good for reading most print-oriented material. My own is a 13.3" Onyx device, and I'm loving it.
They're much better for reading, and tend to reduce distractions.
Then I’ll continue to live my life like I still believe oil comes from dinosaurs.
I think saying that oil comes from dinosaurs gets the relevant point across despite being technically incorrect. I'm not sure if there's a better way to communicate the same knowledge in such a succinct way to a child.
So then when Pixar movies have an oil company called ‘Dinoco’ in them, I’d always assumed that’s as part of that same kind of knowing ‘obviously only a child believes oil comes from dinosaurs’ reference.
The idea that oil could be made from dinosaurs is just.. on its face, it’s not plausible, right? It can’t be something people are actually taught. Please.
In other words, I woke up this morning "knowing" that oil came from dinosaurs, and I will go to bed tonight knowing it came from plankton.
I'm 63.
Sinclair Oil's mascot, dating to 1932, was a factor. I looked through Google Books with some date-ranged searches for "dinosaur" and "oil" or "petroleum". That excludes the video and comic-book evidence, but what seems to show up, even in congressional testimony, are references (mostly tongue-in-cheek) beginning in the 1970s. Given the archive's limited scope, I suspect that the concept could have been picking up in the 1960s or 1950s. Note that this corresponds largely with the widespread adoption of television, which goes in hand with simplified and infantalised messaging through both advertising and mainstream programming.
But the notion was definitely "in the air" as of the early 1970s.
Airplane II was released (or escaped) in 1982.
I know I assumed Fossil Fuel = meant the fuel came from fossils, and the first thing that comes to mind when I hear "fossils" is dinosaurs.
I just never thought to look further than that.
Fossil fuels are fuels that are dug from the ground, rather than harvested from plants (as with wood or olive oil ... itself the original "oil") or animals (as with animal fats and oils).
https://www.etymonline.com/word/fossil
Oil indeed comes from olive: https://www.etymonline.com/word/oil
Coal is a piece of wood: https://www.etymonline.com/word/coal
Carbon is from coal: https://www.etymonline.com/word/carbon
Effectively, the word fossil has done something of an orbit such that an attribute used to describe an object ("dug up" -> petrified remains of plants and animals) came to be ascribed to the word itself, such that "fossil fuels" comes to be popularly interpreted as "remains of ancient plants ... or animals" rather than "dug up fuels".
Similarly, I think a lot of people think dinosaur fossils are all dinosaurs who died when they went extinct, because if fossils are dead dinosaurs, and dinosaurs are famous for dying out, those must be connected, right?
Whereas of course dinosaurs had actually been dying (and starting on their way to being fossils) for millions of years before the extinction event which… actually stopped them from dying any more.
I think your message was truly sincere surprise and I didn't find it rude, but it reminds me a bit of this article which I've found very useful in my personal life: https://jvns.ca/blog/2017/04/27/no-feigning-surprise/
Phytoplankton does not belong to Plant kingdom and neither do Zooplankton to Animal kingdom. Some Zooplankton are animals, which is subbranch of Eukariota to which most zooplankton belongs. Some of phytoplankton, like cyanobacteria are not considered to belong to plant kingdom, also most of plankton are supergrouped together with plants where most of them are not plants, but also belong to Eukariota. TL;TR: Animals and Plants belong to Eukariota, to which belong all plankton - even if most of them does not belong neither to Plants nor Animals.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lie-to-children
Also Wittgenstein's Ladder:
Plankton is new to me too though. I thought it was plants, which could not be fully digested by anything at the time, so they just broke down a bit and formed layer after layer, until other organisms caught up and started digesting them completely - so this sort of concentrated organic matter doesn't exist in upper layers.
There’s direct fossil evidence of fungal rot during the period, and that much lignin production without corresponding decay would have sucked all the CO2 out of the atmosphere in a few million years.
Equation of line has nothing to do with reaching 200ppm, as that is average - adapted to whole timeline. Would look completely different in a different scope.
The study addresses CO2 levels closely, as well as other significant pieces of evidence. I would tend to assume the peer reviewers at one of the world’s most prestigious journals thought to Google up historical CO2 levels.
>"The biomass of these intraterrestrial organisms may be equal to the total weight of all marine and terrestrial plants."
These observations may not fall in line with the current Malthusian, apocalyptic rationales. The phrase "fossil fuels" seems loaded from this perspective. Our knowledge of the natural world is constantly evolving. Making all-encompassing declarative statements might make sense in some situations, but it also makes sense to question them.
https://academic.oup.com/femsle/article/185/1/9/485798
http://scienceline.ucsb.edu/getkey.php?key=5412
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riftia_pachyptila
https://phys.org/news/2019-04-rewriting-textbook-fossil-fuel...
This probably ended up with its cognate fossil, an item, usually of historical value, dug up from a ditch. Since dinosaurs are represented by fossils, people put the two together.
So if without life there they have so much hydrocarbons, why then do we need to believe that our hydrocarbons come from the remains of some dead creatures, whether plankton or dinosaurs?
In the case of oil, the sediments in which deposits are found, the fossils within those deposits, and the chemistry of the oil, all point to biotic rather than abiotic origin.
The paper I've linked in my earlier comment has far more detail and further references: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28105383
Yes, it's possible for hydrocarbons to form by other means. However there's vanishingly little physical evidence to suggest that that is what's actually happened.
Retrosplaining terrestrial hydrocarbon deposits based on remote observation, and one short-lived lander on an outer-solar-system moon (the Huygens probe on Titan, with very limited chemical sensig capabilities) in a hand-wavy attempt to invalidate several centuries of direct terrestrial experience with coal, oil, and gas geology is not exceptionally convincing.
Thomas Gold in the “Deep Hot Biosphere: The Myth of Fossil Fuels” explores the idea in depth.
It’s not quite a crank theory (I think Gold has a legit academic publication history) but it kind of teeters on the edge. It’s one of those ones I’d like to believe, because it turns much of what we think we know on it’s ear. But a sober look at the evidence makes it seem pretty unlikely.
> But if fossil fuel does not come from dinosaurs, then where does it come from? Plankton. That’s right. Petroleum does not originate with the Earth’s largest organisms; it begins with its smallest. Most of the biomass in any ecosystem is contained within the bodies of its humblest members, the ones way down near the base of the food chain. In the oceans, that’s phytoplankton, also known as microalgae. These microscopic organisms, mostly diatoms and dinoflagellates, are wondrously able to turn starlight into food. Through photosynthesis, they produce proteins, fats, and carbohydrates — complex carbon-based molecules. Like most tiny organisms, their generations turn over rapidly. When they expire, their minuscule bodies rain down upon the sea floor, where they form organic oozes that may be miles thick. If these biogenic deposits are buried by younger sediments, and cooked by heat and pressure in just the right way, oil and natural gas may form.
> Taking the long view, petroleum is really a type of solar energy. That may sound nice, but it’s not innocuous. When we burn it, we take carbon from another age, sequestered by ancient plankton, and dump it into today’s atmosphere. There, it traps heat, causes global warming, and acidifies the oceans. In a sense, we’re adding the power of the ancient Mesozoic Sun to today’s Sun, and it’s overheating our planet.
> I’m sure this won’t come as a shock, but don’t believe everything you read on the Internet. Dinosaur toys are not made from dinos, but they are made from dinoflagellates that used starlight from another era to stitch together the carbon-based molecules that today we turn into plastic. A quick search revealed that there are actually plastic plankton toys available online, plastic plankton toys made of — plankton.
Unfortunately global warming is real and there’s plenty of evidence for it. Your mechanism isn’t really the issue though, it’s the greenhouse gases trapping new energy from the sun which is the basic root cause.
Total solar insolation is in the region of 1.8x10^17 W, which is some 10,000 times greater than the total energy use of humanity. This is not so far out when you consider our exponential energy use over the past few centuries! If growth does not slow (which it must), we could expect to use that much energy in about 4 more centuries.
But we could expect to hit problems before then. What percentage of disruption to Earth's energy budget leads to visible effect? Our current imbalance due to greenhouse gases amounts to roughly 1 Watt per square meter, or 0.1%. At our current rate of growth we'll reach that in a mere century! So even if we switch entirely over to nuclear power starting today, and continue along our merry way safe in the knowledge that we're producing no greenhouse gases, in 100 years we'll have a similar warming problem from energy alone.
Given limitless cheap energy like nuclear fusion, the ultimate limit on human population is not land or water but the waste heat that we generate. We're very far from that being an issue today, but in some dystopian future where we turn earth into Coruscant, that could be a thing.
I hope instead we stabilize our population or move to settlements in orbit. I'd like to see the land we currently use for food to be rewilded in a world where we can grow food in orbit and in vertical farms / artificial food factories. It would be nice if future humans mostly lived in cities or space habitats and the earth mostly went back to nature.
Just one source that talks about the changes over the past couple thousand years:
"These indigenous systems were highly sophisticated...There are over 80 domesticated or semi-domesticated crops in the Amazon," he said. "In Europe at the time they were working with about six."
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-environment-amazon-idUSKB...
I'm not particularly bullish on fusion power, though we can dream.
We may well need to deploy configurable sunshade at the earth - sun Lagrange point or something similarly drastic to keep the climate in a hospitable band.
Biomass is basically solar-powered carbon sequestration.
If each year of fossil fuel consumption corresponds to the energy of 400 years of biomass, and we've been burning "too many" fossil fuels for 50 years, then to get out of this mess we would have to cover 50x400 = 20,000 Earth's with solar panels hooked up to carbon capture machines.
It's way worse, if course, because photosynthesis is more efficient than solar panels, and there's inefficiencies in carbon capture, but you get the idea!
We've used up way, way, WAY too much energy making tiny explosions and now we have to undo each and every one of them.
The overall energy efficiency of the natural photosynthesis to sequestered carbon process is not inherently more efficient than man-made alternatives. The efficiency of the PV cell is just one small factor.
A much more accurate way to calculate sequestration potentials is to measure their energy cost and multiply by available energy.
The thrust of this paper is that it takes 90 tons of ancient biomass to result in 1 gallon of gasoline. This is a reduction of 30,000 to 1. This is the opposite of an efficient system. The vast majority of solar input and related carbon captured from the atmosphere by ancient plant matter is not being utilized by modern fossil fuel systems.
The point of this paper is that the ancient photosynthesis to fossil fuels process is incredibly inefficient. The "400 years" isn't indicative of the energy we're consuming today -- it's indicative of the extremely low percentage of solar energy that ends up captured inside fossil fuels.
We absolutely can carbon capture our way out of this. Again, you can do some pretty basic math on known sequestration techniques to disprove your conclusion.
From the first time I saw the animations of the planned Starlink fleet, I started wondering if one could use a satelite fleet to manage incoming solar radiation.
I've commented about it a few times before.
2/3 of the air we breath also comes from plankton.
Trees are mostly net zero in regards to oxygen. What they release during their lifetime they take back when they die and decay.
If there are more trees, there's more oxygen.
Sure, if a tree dies this is eventually reverted but it also makes room for a new tree (unless humanity claims the land).
E.g. see [1] "The growth of these forests removed huge amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, leading to a surplus of oxygen."
[1] https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/carbonife...
There is an open question of why atmospheric O2 has been relatively stable (varied by a factor of several) in the Phanerozoic. This may just be anthropic selection: if it ever fell too far, higher life would have been wiped out, and we wouldn't be here. This has implications for the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence: it might be that most life-bearing worlds suffocate themselves before ETs can evolve.
For the record, the "memory" if you want to call it like this, would be the (unoxidized) carbon buried underground and/or segregated in the plants body.
> Oxygen leaks out when rocks are eroded and weathered..
which is what I reinforced.
?
Perhaps not the best metaphor.
First, the universities were given the task of providing an unceasing supply of ideologically correct candidates for vital positions in government, church, and business. The state was able to make the faculties of the "venerable institutions" of higher education, or rather indoctrination, assume this duty because it controlled appointments and held the purse from which "emoluments" flowed into the coffers of academics. Hence the members of the university "hierarchy" made it their "business, the business for which they ... [were] paid," to "uphold certain political as well as religious opinions," namely those of the "ruling powers of the state" (J.S. Mill, Autobiography and Literary Essays, p. 429 (1981), J.S. Mill, Journals and Debating Speeches, p. 350. (1988) ). Thus the universities pursued with vigor their assignment to inculcate in their students those political and ideological views that were cherished by the power elite. The graduates of the ancient universities were, therefore, well prepared for employment in, and by, those institutions that were instrumental in perpetuating the existing maldistribution of income. All of this might come to naught, however, if the masses of the underclass should achieve anything approaching success in potential attempts at throwing off their fetters.
The state devised a second educational strategy in order to prevent such a calamity from occurring. According to Mill, the "elementary schools for children of the working classes" were given the task of ensuring that the poor would continue to accept docilely their dismal station in life. It was very easy for the state to force the public schools to assume this role. It did so simply by failing malignantly to allocate sufficient funds for the operations of what Mill identified contemptuously as "places called schools" (J.S. Mill, Essays on England, Ireland, and the Empire, p.200; emphasis in original).
See: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00346760110081599
I've discussed this earlier and in more depth here: https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/6x7u6a/on_the_...
Status quo is students being told the Sun is yellow, from preK on through to the most common intro astronomy college textbooks, with only a few of them getting an "oops, nope, our bad" decades later, in astronomy graduate school discussion of common misconceptions in astronomy education. We've known Sun color for a century, had detailed limb darkening and tint numbers for decades, and now years of intensive effort on stellar atmospheres in support of occultation and exoplanet work. Also years of hemispherical-camera daytime-sky surveys. And science education content manages to remain decoupled from all of that.
A startup pivoted from supporting learning of English in Japan, because the market there turned out to be for performance on English proficiency exams, not for English fluency. And a teacher remarked that it seemed the societal objective was English accessibility for work, while avoiding the fluency which could contaminate culture. Similarly, an truly excellent briefing on biology would necessarily be pervasively steeped in evolution... and thus be less than entirely welcome in the US. Not that Europe or Russia, or China, India, or Brasil, have incentivized its creation either. It seems neither the science research nor science education communities are set up to pursue it.
[1] https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Larimore+Vision+2020
https://theconversation.com/coals-formation-is-a-window-on-a...
"A famous site at Nyrany in the Czech Republic was discovered because the director of the natural history museum there had coal delivered to heat his room. Splitting the coal sometimes yielded well-preserved fossils of early amphibians, so he could add scientifically significant specimens to his collections without leaving his office."
I'm surprised oil is plankton, not dinosaurs/dinosaur plants as the myth goes.
Solar and wind are not solutions as plants are a solar panel and maintenance free battery in one, without any work required.
Nuclear (1.000.000.000x higher energy density than batteries) is our only hope/despair to have any chance at preserving this way of life for 8 billion people but it requires hydrocarbons to build and maintain.
Reduce your energy consumption as much as possible: no car, small house/appartement.
Work on meaningful digital solutions that scale without too much energy.
Quit everything else.
The population will go down to 1 billion from here, that much is inevitable. The question is how fast it goes down and how much people will suffer: we peaked our growth-rate in 1968: https://ourworldindata.org/future-population-growth
The energy density argument for nuclear goes nowhere. It's not something any consumer cares about, nor is energy density a showstopper for renewables (except biomass, so don't base the renewable energy system on biomass).