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Now, I don't know a lot about oil or what it's made of, but that doesn't sound like a bad idea. Assuming we had enough of what is needed to make oil, I think it would work.

mortifiedpenguin wrote:Now, I don't know a lot about oil or what it's made of, but that doesn't sound like a bad idea. Assuming we had enough of what is needed to make oil, I think it would work.

Sure we just need some dinosaures and 100 million years.

mortifiedpenguin wrote:Now, I don't know a lot about oil or what it's made of, but that doesn't sound like a bad idea. Assuming we had enough of what is needed to make oil, I think it would work.

(Slaps forehead) Gosh, if only I had thought of that! Maybe we could come up with a tablet that we could just drop in a barrel of water, and suddenly we get oil. Sorta like the Fizzies of our youth!

MP,
I understand where you are comming from since you just found out about the situation. What you have to understand is that oil is the basic feed stock for alot of the chemicals used in industry today, let alone the use for fuel. Try this out http://www.peakoil.com/fortopic505.html

mortifiedpenguin wrote:I don't know a lot about oil or what it's made of.

Oil is a hydrocarbon. That means it contains Hydrogen and Carbon.

Get a bunch of H and C and glue 'em together and you get Oil.

To make oil you can have biological cells make fat (oil) in an attempt to store energy for a latter day or future generations OR you can take Hydrogen and Carbon, lock them in a room, compress the room while warming the room and get eventually some oil.

Considering the oil we now have has a translation like this: 98 tones of old organic material to make 1 gallon of gas making more oil is non trivial.

Even if you have material to feed a process that heats and compresses organic matter, you STILL have to have energy to heat and compress that organic matter.

The lowest tech way of getting oil is letting plants make seeds/animals make fat and making a fuel from that. The medium tech highest yield seems to be growing Algae. The high tech ways are making methanol from Air and using ALOT of electrical power or taking animal bits and subjecting them to a process called Thermal Depolymerization.

Assuming we had enough of what is needed to make oil, I think it would work.

OK, first, get a sieve or collander and then collect the drainage from this:

I remember doing cracking/fractional distillation in chemistry at school - showed us all the different -anes and -enes - basicly different levels of fuels that you can get from crude oil.

I loved that, I was thinking about it the other day and wondering what the hell happened to all the good stuff at school, and how come by the time I did some chemistry at uni. it didn't make any sense at all and they were always asking us to do things that they hadn't taught us about ( so how the fudge was i meant to know what to do.... )

What I thought reading thru this thread - what plants produce the most fatty-oils? Mentioned the solid-fuel-fat thing in the Peak Fat thread, candles for example are marvellous made with beeswax and they are made from lanolin too (which I think is from wool from sheep) - anyone ever used one of those big candles with multiple wicks to try heating a hotplate, see how easy it is to cook on?

Goat 'dung' is supposed to be a great fertiliser addition to composts for maximising oils produced by plants ; that might be only for essential oils and aromatics tho' - I read it years ago in an organic gardening book.

Another thing from chemistry days - soap and it's ionic and covalent molecular structure ; soap cleans oil because part of it absorbs the oil - is this used at all in extracting? sounds like it would be great for mopping up every drop, then you'd need to re-extract it of course.