| ▲ | csours 11 hours ago |
| 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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| ▲ | CGMthrowaway 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| >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 |
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| ▲ | joe_the_user 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| 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). |
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| ▲ | danans 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | > 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. | | |
| ▲ | defrost 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | 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. |
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| ▲ | moralestapia 11 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| 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. |
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| ▲ | jemmyw 7 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | 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 | | |
| ▲ | zhivota 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | 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. | |
| ▲ | CGMthrowaway 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiogenic_petroleum_origin | |
| ▲ | nayuki 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Does Titan have enough oxygen to allow the combustion of hydrocarbons? | | |
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| ▲ | Brian_K_White 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | 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) | | |
| ▲ | adrian_b 9 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | 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. | |
| ▲ | rcxdude 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | 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. | |
| ▲ | IsTom 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Wikipedia seems to disagree https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petroleum#Abiogenic_petroleum | |
| ▲ | HillRat 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | It's pretty common for hydrocarbons to migrate down from source rocks down into basement along fracture lines or surface weathering, no abiogenesis required. |
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| ▲ | csours 11 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Well, there are a lot of planets, and a lot of time. So I would say yes. On average though, I would say no. | |
| ▲ | augusto-moura 11 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | We can't be sure, but probably not on the solar system. |
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| ▲ | Rekindle8090 11 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| solar panels dont convert air into fuel |
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| ▲ | csours 11 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Thank you? Solar panels don't convert air to fuel directly, but you could use the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabatier_reaction | | | |
| ▲ | margalabargala 11 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | 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. | |
| ▲ | Brian_K_White 10 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Of course they do. They convert anything you want into anything else you want. |
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