The chemistry behind oil.

Oil has become a HUGE issue these days, anyone who owns a car can understand that. My interest is in the process in which oil is formed naturally. According to chemistry, it would take at least 300 million years for oil deposits to form. this is a far older view of the earth than depicted in biblical text. since no references were made to the deliberate divine placement of oil, how then is its presence today accounted for?http://www.energyquest.ca.gov/story/chapter08.htmlUniversity of Michigan: File Not Found ( 404 )if earth is in fact only a few thousand years old, where then did all this oil come from? and if it was deliberate, then why was it not mentioned with more emphasis in religious literature?

I'm not sure what to do with this topic. It doesn't fit well in any of the religious forums, and you might not receive many responses if we place it in the appropriate science forum. Creationists can just say that God placed the oil in the ground.Or you can let this sit for a while, and see how your other topic works out. Then we can discuss what to do with this topic later. Please reply to this message to indicate your preferences.

i would say perhaps geology and flood forum? i'm relatively new here and still unfamiliar with how things work. you'd probably know better than i would.

Thread moved here from the Proposed New Topics forum.

300 My is an exaggeration. I don't have hard data at hand, but five or ten million years is probably a decent guess: you need time for burial of organic-rich sediment, burial of that sediment to enough depth to heat it into the oil-generation window of temperature, and time enough for the generated fluids to migrate into reservoir rock. California and southern Louisiana both have bunches of Miocene - 10 Ma old or so - oil and gas.Lots of the oil in Oklahoma and Kansas is, indeed, more like 300 Ma, but it's been sitting there in the reservoir for much or most of that time.5,000,000 years is still rather an uncomfortably long time in the YEC universe. ;-)

If you do a google search for "thomas+gold+oil", that will turn up a lot of links about possible non-biological sources for oil.There doesn't appear to be much support for the idea. As far as I know, Gold's theory has not proven fruitful in finding new oil fields. Nevertheless, it does provide some sort of basis for a creationist who wants to argue that the finding of oil does not provide evidence for evolutionary assumptions.

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said by a creationist: I am saying we always only witness "poofs." Poofs are basic to what consitutes physical reality.

The only "hits" I'm aware of that Gold claims are the Siljan Ring, a meteor crater in Sweden, and an oil field offshore Vietnam (it has either "tiger" or "dragon" in its name). I don't know if the Swedish field has enough gas to even be commercial, though the Vietnamese field is very productive. Neither have I read enough on either discovery to be able to talk intelligently on "conventional" explanations for them.Birkeland, are you around?

300 million years is just a figure i regurgitated from a number of energy sources, including many fossil fuel providers and universities. regardless, the point remains the same, oil formation takes a very long time that creation story just doenst allow room for. i'm expecting the old "ignore it and it'll go away" response to this thread from the creationists.This message has been edited by be LIE ve, 11-13-2005 02:27 PM

Answers in Genesis claims that rapid coalification has been done in the lab. I don't know what kind of yields they're getting, or even if the product is actually "coal". Maybe somebody who knows more than I do would like to look at it.

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People who think they have all the answers usually don't understand the questions.

In that article, they are also claiming that "coal" was formed during the Mt. St. Helens eruption.Could they be confusing charcoal with coal?

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"Intellectually, scientifically, even artistically, fundamentalism -- biblical literalism -- is a road to nowhere, because it insists on fidelity to revealed truths that are not true." -- Katha Pollitt

while interesting, its a small source. just as the old saying goes "theres more than one way to skin a cat". you can make lots of things in many different ways, however, when it comes to things like this, you've got to look at the granduer scale. theres ALOT of fossil fuels scattered in the earth, and its impossible that they all formed in that manner (which requires rather specific conditions). just because theres a loop hole, doesnt mean it will apply on a large scale. i've noticed creationists will take small examples of things like this, and use them to refute questions that must be answered on a bigger scale, i.e. the bombadier beetle. while its possible that you can make coal that way, naturally occuring coal in large yields wasnt.this reminds me of a cubiczirconia. diamonds take a long time to form as well, but they can be made forcefully and quickly through a similar artifical processes. just because you CAN make them quicker, doesnt refute the claim that naturally occuring diamonds take a very long time to crystalize.This message has been edited by be LIE ve, 11-13-2005 03:09 PM

Amen to that - there were lots of layer-cake stacks of coals investigated by William Smith before 1815 (!!) that were separated by non-coal rocks, with different fossils in the various rocks, and frequently with traces of roots in clays below each coal layer. AiG and the like consistently refuse to address this 190-year-old gaping hole in their "theory" of how that coal got there.

Which is why I was wondering about yields. If they're converting, say, 1% of (something) to something resembling coal, it would have taken a heck of a pile of (something) to make all those fossil fuels.Assuming that that "something" is plant material (and I'm not sure they admit that either), then it would have taken a heck of a long time for all those plants to grow, die, be buried, etc. before the "coalification" process could even begin.

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People who think they have all the answers usually don't understand the questions.

Could they? Anyone who is capable of looking at the Grand Canyon and can believe all of the layers were laid down and the canyon carved out within a year or so during the Flood is capable of confusing just about anything.