The previous post has my Moron brain spinning but I can't find some statistics I'm looking for.

1) How much oil has been recovered or discovered in total in all of history. Basically, to our knowledge, how much total oil have we found ever?

2) How much base plan matter does it take to make one barrel of oil?

3) How much total biological mass exists on the planet's surface RIGHT NOW?

Anyone know where I can find this stuff?

Update: Okay, here's why I asked. I wanted to see if we could get a rough idea of how much biomass it would take to generate as many fossil fuels as we see. I'm inclined to think it is absurd to think surface biomass accounts for all of it.   Warning, what is below is not really scientific.  Its just me fiddling with numbers to get an idea of the scales involved.   In fact, its probably really stupid but I'm a moron and my bullshit detector tells me that how science explains fossil fuels, like the environment, is missing several major details.
First, I needed an idea of how much total biomass is on the surface at any given moment. For that I went here (thanks Veeshir) and didn't get a complete number. Apparently, crops, humans, ants, sheep, chickens, plankton, antarctic krill and cattle add up to about 11.8 billion tons of biomass (if you take the higher number for ants... wow, that's a lot of ants).

For the sake of all the things left out, I estimate a surface mass of 1 trillion tons of biomass. I figure that ought to cover it when all fish are estimated at less than 2 billion tons, etc. Good enough for a rough estimate anyway.

Next, I needed to know how much carbon is in the biomass to figure out in some basic way how much fossil fuel can be produced per ton of biomass. Turns out the human body is 18% carbon so I used that as a baseline. Good enough for my first, rough approach to the matter.

That means that if you took the carbon of all living mass on the planet you'd come out with something like 180 billion tons of carbon. Not too shabby.

Now, how much carbon is in fossil fuels? I couldn't quickly find a source for that on oil but I easily found one for coal. Turns out there is about 780kg of carbon per metric ton of coal so about 78%. How much coal is currently remaining in the global reserve? A staggering 900 billion tons. That gives us 702 billion tons of carbon in coal alone.

So it would take nearly 4 times the total biomass of the earth's surface and oceans to account for just the coal we've found. That leaves the oil entirely out of it. A ton of oil is about 7.3 barrels according to this site.  Turns out its pretty insignificant anyway*. 

That seems like a lot of carbon.

Now, my question is, how did several times the current surface biomass get thousands of feet underground?  It is clear in our current ecosystem that almost NONE of our biomass actually leaves the surface ever.  Sure, the odd tree or animal carcass gets buried deeply but almost all carbon is recaptured by other nearby living things and kept at the surface.  What process could account for SO FREAKING much of the stuff at such extreme depths?

Any ideas on what I might be missing?

More: Veeshir makes the correct point (and one I had considered) that it had a long, long time to accumulate down there.  Still, I don't see how that much biomass is escaping the rest of the ecosystem and sinking into the Earth beyond recovery.  I mean, what percentage do you think gets away now?  .1%?  .5%?

* - Let's assume that oil is way less carbony with only 25% carbon (I bet its higher if anyone could find me a number.) Global oil reserves are estimated at 1.2 TRILLION barrels of oil. That's 164 billion tons of oil or 41 billion tons of carbon.

Posted by: Moron Pundit at 11:42 AM | Comments (37) | Add Comment
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