Hydrocarbons Could Form Deep In the Earth From Methane, Not Animal Remains
No More Oil Steve Jurvetson via FlickrStudy lends credence to abiogenic petroleum theory, which means there may be more oil in our future than we thought A new study demonstrates how high hydrocarbons could be formed from methane deep within the Earth, aside from the compression and heating of ancient animal remains over the eons. Fused-methane oil would be far less common than your typical petroleum, of course, but the study shows abiogenic hydrocarbons could conceivably occur in some of the planet's high-pressure and high-temperature zones. Scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory used supercomputers to simulate what would happen to carbon and hydrogen atoms buried 40 to 95 miles beneath the Earth's crust, where they would be subjected to prodigious pressures and temperatures. They found at temperatures greater than 2,240 degrees F and pressures 50,000 times greater than those at the Earth's surface, methane molecules can fuse to form hydrocarbons with...