Oil's true Nature

I would like to give everyone who reads this an opportunity to share the awareness of our common fate. It starts with the obvious: the largest contribution to greenhouse gases comes from fossil fuels. Instead of talking about the unavoidable consequences, I will take this opportunity to briefly reflect on the origins of this particular source of energy to refresh our views.

As you know, oil is the result of very inefficient geological processes. In an article on USA Today (Petersen 2022), I found that 2,500 metric tons of organic material, mostly phytoplankton, are required to produce a single barrel of oil. It would take 750 years’ worth of all the oceans’ phytoplankton production to replenish our current yearly consumption, roughly 36,800,000,000 barrels worldwide (Statista 2022). One can claim that oil can be consumed sustainably only if our consumption does not exceed the ‘natural production’ of 43,700 barrels a year. However, regions with both highly productive phytoplankton and minimal decomposition are rare in comparison to some of the main periods of oil formation form oil (Dukes 2022). So actual numbers of ‘natural production’ will be much lower than 43,700 barrels a year.

However, the real glitch is that oil is the product of chemical processes over a period of millions of years; 70% of oil deposits existing today were formed in the Mesozoic age (252 to 66 million years ago), 20% were formed in the Cenozoic age (65 million years ago), and only 10% were formed in the Paleozoic age (541 to 252 million years ago).

It is a stable form of trapped sunlight, collected over millions of years. It is a product of a chemical reaction that gave birth to our current biosphere. Putting this product back into the equation is as much as undoing part of the process of our earthly evolution.

As an engineer and researcher, I like challenges. Unfortunately, this is a challenge that proves too big to tackle in the short term. We urgently need to embrace alternatives and learn to deal with the consequences for many decades to follow. I can only hope this short text will contribute to our collective awareness.

Resources:

• Jeffrey Dukes (2022) a global ecology researcher at the Carnegie Institution for Science, Aug. 4-11, Phone interview and email exchange with USA TODAY

• Statista (2022) https://www.statista.com/statistics/271823/global-crude-oil-demand/

• Kate S. Petersen (2022) Fact check: Oil is being extracted more quickly than it forms. USA TODAY 2022/08/15