The peak oil scare of the early 00’s was promoted by geophysicists such as Colin Campbell and it’s basic premise was that the world would be depleted of cheap oil by about 2004, meaning that there would always be oil but it wouldn’t be economically feasible to extract it after a certain point; the energy invested to extract it would be greater than the energy yield of the oil itself. At the time this made perfect sense to me, but alas, it never came to be. Now it seems that the world is awash in cheap oil. Live and learn. The idea of abiotic oil has also gained some traction in the interim. Russia, one of the largest oil-producers, bases its oil production policies on that very concept. The conventional wisdom that used to be taught was that oil came from dinosaurs that died and were then covered by sediments which incrementally accrued and caused the dinosaurs to, under intense pressure, break down into their hydrocarbon constituents. Sinclair Oil used have a dinosaur as its logo and sold gasoline under brand names like Dino Supreme, and so on. I would think that a dinosaur that died suddenly of, say, a heart attack, would have its carcass eaten by scavengers or just decay, not wait patiently to be covered with sediments. And some oil fields are miles under the sea floor. So apparently dinosaurs lived down there. Who knew?
