Where Do Fossil Fuels Come From?
Apparently fossil fuels are mined out of the Earth’s crust. Fossil fuels are derived from the remains of organisms that lived millions of years ago. They have been preserved as geologic deposits in reasonable proximity to the earth’s surface (typically <10 kilometers deep). According to our current understanding, these deposits initially resulted from significant imbalance between the rate of net primary production and the decomposition rate in many regions of the world in the late Paleozoic and the Mesozoic period of earth's history, because of a dominant environment that favors abundant growth of living organisms, while preventing their rapid decay to CO2 and H2O. After a certain period of anaerobic decomposition of these deposited organic matter, only insoluble solid material known as kerogen remained. Over the course of geological time (typically, millions of years), the accumulated kerogen was buried more and more deeply in the earth's crust. The more deeply it was buried, the hig
