First of all, the idea of organic formation of oil is not as simple as saying that animal carcasses turned into oil when they were dumped on the ground, if that’s what you think, you don’t know what the organic formation of oil argument is. In fact, if you dig up the ground of some forests or grasslands, you will see the scene underneath, these deeply buried soil is called “swampy soil”, which contains up to 20% organic matter. This is because many organic components of plants, animals and microorganisms are “collected” by the soil.

And the soil is actually constantly generated – every 100 years will increase by about 3 cm thick, and these organic materials are in this process is gradually buried in the ground. Do not underestimate this 100-year 3 cm thickness increase, a million years of mud increased the thickness of 300 meters, 100 million years of mud increased the thickness of 3 km. And the emergence of life on Earth has been more than 4 billion years, you say how much accumulated with a lot of organic material mud? So this mud and the organic material in the mud is the basis for the formation of oil.

Studies have found that the main component contained in oil is hydrocarbons, in addition to some elements such as sulfur, nitrogen and oxygen. Scientists therefore speculate that oil is formed by the abundant carbon contained in the earth’s strata, and not by the remains of living organisms. Since the mass of hydrocarbons is relatively small, they are more likely to run into the earth’s surface and then be found by us to form oil fields. The theory that oil is formed from hydrocarbons in the strata is the abiogenic theory, which is the mainstream theory of oil formation, while the traditional biogenic theory has been proven wrong.

Although we have been using oil on an industrial scale for more than a century, scientists do not know exactly how it was formed, but it is certain that it was not formed from the remains of ancient organisms, and that the occasional animal fossils found in oil are the result of their being accidentally dropped in.

Globally, scientists estimate that the Earth holds a total of 2092 billion barrels of oil reserves, or 286.6 billion tons. a 2018 study published in PNAS Yes census of biomass on Earth shows that the total biomass of the Earth’s biosphere is 550 billion tons of carbon, of which the ocean biomass, although a small fraction, is astronomical, with about 500 million tons of Antarctic krill alone as primary consumers. Since the energy transfer efficiency of the food chain is only about 10%, most of the biomass in the ocean is mainly photosynthetic bacteria, algae and plankton. Thus oil reserves are actually produced primarily by marine microbes, including bacteria, algae and plankton, rather than large animals, and these microbes have short lifetimes that can be measured in days, hours or even minutes, so the biomass of dead microbes will actually be much higher than the total biomass each year. As the microbes gradually die, they sink to the bottom of the sea and are gradually covered by accumulated sediments, a process that continues for tens or even hundreds of millions of years, gradually transforming them into the hundreds of billions of tons of existing oil not surprisingly.