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Comment by csours | Hacker News Reader

I'd love to see an investigation into fossil fuel accumulation over geological time scales - especially petroleum.

From what I've seen, 10,000 barrels per year is a reasonable guestimate.

If that is the case, then just the electrical energy harvested from solar panels in the UK could convert air into fuel at a faster rate than the WHOLE earth (on average over geological time scales) (as long as the fuel conversion/production was at least 1% efficient at converting electricity to fuel).

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1owp09/if_oil_t...

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S209624951...

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The thing is that the supply of fossil fuel depends one's willingness to spend effort finding it. There's a virtually unlimited amount of methane on the ocean floor but harvesting it is not economically viable (fortunately).

US fracking technology allows otherwise unavailable heavy oil to be harvested but naturally at a higher price than Saudi light crude.

So solar tech, as it declines in cost, will replace a larger and larger portion of fossil fuels but not the entire spectrum of these some come out of the ground close to the form we need them in (solar asphalt is hard to imagine with subsidies).

There is so much hydrocarbons and coal underground we would transform the Earths atmosphere to hell, if we would mine and burn it all.

"Natural gas and oil could last for about 50 years, uranium for around 100 years, and coal reserves, which are the most abundant, roughly 150 years at current consumption levels."

https://www.energyencyclopedia.com/en/physics-mysteries/147-...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_coal_rese...

In case of uranium, it's possible to extract it from seawater. This technology was developed and tested, but at current low prices of uranium it's cheaper to mine it.

http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2014/ph241/regalbuto2/

> Natural gas and oil could last for about 50 years, uranium for around 100 years, and coal reserves

Out of interest, what common basic error is being made by Jaroslav Kores, Ph.D. from your link, aside from not showing his working or sources?

It's something worth getting on top of.

Here's an alternative link regarding Australia; https://www.ga.gov.au/aecr2025/uranium-and-thorium

couple of extracts:

  Australia’s uranium resources are expressed as Economic Demonstrated Resources (EDR), Subeconomic Demonstrated Resources (SDR) and Inferred Resources. Refer to Appendix 3 for definitions of these terms and further information on the National Classification System for reporting of Identified Mineral Resources.

  Based on 2023 production rates, Australia’s uranium reserves have an estimated life of 71 years.

What's all this fuss about words? What are resources, what are reserves? Do we really only have 71 years worth of uranium in Australia?

For example better discussion about oil reserves: https://www.livescience.com/planet-earth/how-much-oil-is-lef...

I just wanted to signify that there is so much available hydrocarbons and coal underground that humanity will run out of atmospheric CO2 budget before it runs out of hydrocarbons.

> humanity will run out of atmospheric CO2 budget before it runs out of hydrocarbons.

I agree that is very much all that's needed to be said.

I confess to a shuddering dislike of statements of the form "we only have {x} left", a dislike exceeded by my revulsion to statements of the form "we have {X} amount left in the crust or ocean - we can just use that".

Call it a side effect of a couple of decades of geophysical exploration work across the globe :/

The reserves of any mineral are basically the amount someone spends the effort to find and document. And spending that effort is an economic decision. There's little economic incentive to find reserves beyond a certain period of time so the reserves of any mineral are going to be only fairly limited amount of years out.

> solar asphalt is hard to imagine with subsidies

Arguably asphalt is exactly the sort of application we should be using petroleum for - keeping it sequestered in earth instead of burning it.

No - asphalt is bound together by bitumen, a sticky, waterproof byproduct of petroleum refining.

eg: You don't get asphalt without bitumen and you don't get bitumen save as a byproduct of a massive amount of fossil fuels being pulled up .. and inevitably increasing the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere.

> You don't get asphalt without bitumen and you don't get bitumen save as a byproduct of a massive amount of fossil fuels being pulled up

There are alternatives to virgin bitumen for binding asphalt, like recycled asphalt [1], asphalt blended with recycled rubber, etc. These could conceivably be used together with a smaller amount of virgin petroleum-derived bitumen.

1. https://www.nyc.gov/site/ddc/resources/features/july-2016-gr...

Indeed. There are also paths to tackling the impacts from concrete, from steel making, from livestock generating methane, etc.

The figure that has to watched, reduced, and ideally if possible made negative for a time is the rate of CO2 addition to the atmosphere; pulling up additional hydrocarbons already sequestered will always(?) lead to some amount of additional CO2 being set free as a gas.

The very existence of any bitumen (derived from buried hydrocarbons) is just a sign of the horse (previously sequestered CO2) having already left the stable (buried for millenia).

>I'd love to see an investigation into fossil fuel accumulation over geological time scales - especially petroleum. From what I've seen, 10,000 barrels per year is a reasonable guestimate.

From what we know it's a very lumpy distribution. Most of the fossil fuels were created in a few specific points of history

Random question and memes-aside, is there oil on other planets?

Edit: GPT says hydrocarbons yes, oil as in Earth no (because that comes from complex living matter).

Edit 2: As far as we know, I really hope there's more life out there.

Titan:

> According to Cassini data, scientists announced on February 13, 2008, that Titan hosts within its polar lakes "hundreds of times more natural gas and other liquid hydrocarbons than all the known oil and natural gas reserves on Earth." The desert sand dunes along the equator, while devoid of open liquid, nonetheless hold more organics than all of Earth's coal reserves.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lakes_and_rivers_of_Titan

The next obvious question is where do they come from since presumably there weren't dinosaurs and plants dying there 300 million years ago.

Went on a bit of a rabbit hole and it appears that there is a lot of methane in the atmosphere and that gets broken down via photolysis into hydrocarbons somehow, and the methane likely is there from the formation of the moon originally via methane ice.

> gets broken down via photolysis into hydrocarbons somehow

See Figure 2 [1]. Protons, electrons and water ions from space dissociate, in the presence of sunlight, nitrogen and methane. Those combine into intermediate-mass hydrocarbons that produce complex organics. The part we don't understand is how those complex organics, e.g. benzene and naphthalene, turn into large organic particles.

[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10961852/#fig2

"abiogenic oil" is a fringe belief that I just can't stop myself from giving some credence to. I know all the experts say it's not true, and I'm not crazy enough to deny the evidence, but there's still the niggling doubt in the back of my mind. There's so many hydrocarbons out in space.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiogenic_petroleum_origin

Does Titan have enough oxygen to allow the combustion of hydrocarbons?

> Does Titan have enough oxygen to allow the combustion of hydrocarbons?

Titan's atmosphere "is a largely anoxic environment, with little oxygen to cause the termination of complex organic reactions" [1].

[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10961852/

No, otherwise the first meteorite to hit would have caused the whole thing to go up in a massive conflagration.

This would make a great plot point in a space opera.

I thought they discovered at least decades ago that our oil is actually largely inorganic? It's not dinosaurs & ferns but a direct chemical & physical process. I know a lot of people still say it's just a competing theory but they have found many large deposits in places where it's not possible for it to have been organic. (too deep, in the middle of pure granite with only raw volcanic material and no other organics, etc)

Oil is fluid, so it will not necessarily stay where it is formed, but it will flow through the rocks until it is stopped by impermeable rocks, like granite.

So there is nothing surprising in finding oil elsewhere than where it has formed.

Some hydrocarbons can form in the absence of life, e.g. by Fischer-Tropsch synthesis from syngas, catalyzed by some minerals, where syngas can form in volcanic gases or in hydrothermal vents. However that is likely to have been a negligible contribution to the oil reserves of the Earth and most or all oil ever found has a chemical composition that has clear indications of being produced by the decay of organic matter from living beings.

As far as I understand it, people looking for oil using theories that oil is formed from organic processes have had significantly more success than people looking for oil using inorganic theories, and not for lack of trying on the latter side.

Wikipedia seems to disagree https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petroleum#Abiogenic_petroleum

It's pretty common for hydrocarbons to migrate down from source rocks down into basement along fracture lines or surface weathering, no abiogenesis required.

I'll take the opportunity to share this beautiful sci-fi video that is (ostensibly) about oil extraction on the exoplanet Solstice-5: https://youtu.be/Gl2hTmgG18k

Well, there are a lot of planets, and a lot of time.

So I would say yes.

On average though, I would say no.

We can't be sure, but probably not on the solar system.

10,000 barrels per year seems super low. Some figures I found of google

estimated total fossil fuel in the earth 1.90E+16 tons (all the hydrocarbons, not just easily extracted)

say it got there over a billion years that would be approx 2E7 tons/yr or 1E8 barrels.

ie. 100,000,000 barrels equivalent a year.

Source?

Are you referring to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerogen?

At any rate, this is why I would like to see a better investigation of the subject

Better Kerogen wiki: https://wiki.aapg.org/Kerogen

Source this https://www.scirp.org/journal/paperinformation?paperid=92529

No idea if it's correct.

solar panels dont convert air into fuel

Thank you?

Solar panels don't convert air to fuel directly, but you could use the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabatier_reaction

H2 is already a fuel

Solar panels generate energy which can be used for a variety of purposes. One of those uses is converting air to fuel.

If it helps you, think of it like money. You cannot eat it or be sheltered beneath it, but you can use it to purchase food and shelter.

Of course they do. They convert anything you want into anything else you want.

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