Why is there misinformation about oil being a nonrenewable resource?

Question

Oil is actually produced by microorganisms, which technically makes it a BIOFUEL, people!! Biofuels are fuels that are produced as metabolic byproducts from biochemical reactions. While we don't have the current capacity to MAKE (not refine, there is a difference) oil at the rate it is consumed, it is technically feasible. Look it up.

Answer 1

Oil is very much a renewable resource  but it will take good engineering to make oil efficiently. Its a matter of using what nature provides rather than dumping unwanted man made stuff off on nature. Good engineering can be developed and the ground work is mostly in place. Good engineering can  be applied and would greatly aid the development of a good energy system.  This has nothing to do with politics or law making its just good engineering. All the misinformation about energy and pollution is poor education which is another problem that needs to be fixed.

Answer 2

The misinformation occurred a long time ago when we were sold a bill of goods on fossil fuel capacity and failed to invest in research of alternative sources, one of them being biofuels.

We sure are paying the price now, are we not?

Answer 3

Whenever it's pointed out that oil is a non-renewable resource, they're talking about crude dating back to the Carboniferous Period, not vegetable oil refuse from restaurants.  If humans would stop pumping oil and then wait around another 300 million years, we'll have lots of this kind of oil again in the ground.  Not a problem.

Answer 4

Fossil fuels are called fossil fuels because it takes millions of years for them to form.  The definition of "fossil" (adjective) is "preserved from a past geologic age".  These are definately not renewable.

We can make other oils, and these are not called fossil fuels.  They are called "Biofuels" or something to that effect.  The oil we pump out of the ground is fossil fuel and there is no argument about it!

Answer 5

Yes, it is a renewable resource, however, it doesn't replenish in a way that will help people immediately. And because of this cost compared to benefit, and because it is harmful to ecosystems-us- there is more interest in better renewable resources. The interest is, in some part, from the energy industry and governments who don't wish to have their economies suppressed by foreign oil.

Petroleum geologists think we will pass the world oil spike sometime between 2008 and 2010. It will take, argues world wide peak-oil expert Richard Heinberg, a second world war effort if many of us are to come through this epoch.

We will come to a point soon where the small amount left in the ground is too expensive to obtain because of amount of oil, therefore, making it impracticle to obtain.either way, today or tomorrow we 'run out' we will have to have alternatives to fuel the economies of the world, industry, and people. We can either get those alternative energies supplies started now when it would be relatively easy, or wait until oil is too dwindled and everyone is in crises. One way or the other, alternative energy is in the future.

It is paranoid to assume that there is "misinformation". In fact, I haven't heard anyone who is educated or smart talk about it thusly.

Answer 6

The oil resources (and coal and natural gas) are built on a period of time when huge amounts of vegetable matter were growing and falling into the equivalent of peat bogs and shallow lakes.  It was generally warmer.   If you look around, you will find not a lot of high humidity, heavy growth wet places.   And the solar processing the plants were doing for a couple of million years "harvested" a lot of sunshine over a vast area and sunshine is relatively weak per square meter.

Answer 7

I think that's true, but an over-simplification.

Oil is the product of a process which was started when algal blooms died off and settled to the bottom of the sea over many years and were covered. Plate tectonics then drove those deposits underground, and "cooked" them by subjecting them to pressure and heat from inside the earth for millions of years. More pressure and heat (deeper deposits) results in gas, less results in oil, less still gives you a "stinky shale".

If you wanted to reproduce this process, you would need to add-in all the energy for the processing before you get anything like oil out.

This isn't really feasible in the volumes we're using globally.

I do think that algae might be a solution to excess carbon though.