A Future History of Oil

It was the Late Jurassic. Dinosaurs were still around. The planet was covered in very shallow, warm oceans full of plant life. But the sea was so warm that oxygen couldn’t penetrate it. Because of this lack of oxygen, anything that died took a very long time to decompose. As billions of algae and plankton perished and fell to the ocean floor, they stayed there, unable to be recycled. More and more of their microscopic bodies kept falling into the abyss, until huge piles of dead microorganisms filled the bottom of the oceans. Then came the sediment: rivers, volcanos, erosion, all brought with them material that was deposited on top of all this dead plant life.

But the organisms still failed to decompose in this absence of oxygen. Instead, they were mummified and fossilised, as the pressure of the weight above forced their carbon molecules to bond, and form long chains with each other, consisting of 10 atoms or more. This new type of rock, made of dead plants, was kerogen, the precursor of oil and gas.

As the sediment kept piling on, the weight above created incredible pressure. Kerogen was pushed further down, deeper into the planet’s crust, where the heat coming from the depths of the Earth’s core combined with the pressure above and began to cook it. It broke down into shorter carbon chains, new molecules some of which were of liquid, and even gaseous form. These compounds eventually became the oil and natural gas we are familiar with today. Being much lighter in weight, these materials began to percolate upwards through the crust. But there were too many rocks in their way. Most of the gas and oil became safely trapped deep under rock formations, creating huge, black reservoirs that stayed idle for millions of years.

But nothing on Earth ever stays the same. This is a planet that recycles everything and finds a use for every material. Small leaks of oil and gas eventually made it to the surface of the crust, where they spontaneously combusted. The CO2 released into the air became food for plants across the planet. It may have taken hundreds of millions of years, but Earth finally found a way to recycle, reuse, and reintegrate into the ecosystem’s food chain even these bizarre new chemicals. The long-term plan was to burn the gas and oil off and let the ecosystem absorb it very slowly over many millions of years, with no impact to the climate. The plant microorganisms that had lived many millions of years ago, would now finally become recycled.

But history would turn out otherwise. More than a million years ago, a mammal called Homo erectus discovered fire. Roughly another million years later, Homo sapiens created a civilisation based entirely on combustion: in 1859, it drilled the first commercial oil well in Titusville, Pennsylvania, USA. Homo sapiens became a saprophytic civilisation: dependent on the consumption of the carcasses of organisms who had perished millions of years ago.

As the climate warms, the shallow oceans will return. Billions of humans will die from heat, war, starvation and anoxia, buried under ocean sediment, just like the plants who died in the Jurassic period. They will be cooked to perfection and turned into the next generation of fossil fuel. Earth recycles everything, including advanced civilisations.