Crude Oil in One Hour, Not Millions of Years

A slurry of algae with the right heat and pressure can produce crude oil in one hour.

The Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory has succeeded in producing crude oil in an hour and is now working on making the process run continuously for rapid production. The process is actually faster than an hour, Science Daily reports:

Engineers have created a continuous chemical process that produces useful crude oil minutes after they pour in harvested algae — a verdant green paste with the consistency of pea soup….

In the PNNL process, a slurry of wet algae is pumped into the front end of a chemical reactor. Once the system is up and running, out comes crude oil in less than an hour, along with water and a byproduct stream of material containing phosphorus that can be recycled to grow more algae.

Science Daily contrasts the rapid oil-producing process with the “millions of years” nature supposedly used.  The headline reads, “Million-Year Natural Process Takes Minutes in the Lab.”  Engineer Douglas Elliott believes that, too:

“It’s a bit like using a pressure cooker, only the pressures and temperatures we use are much higher,” said Elliott. “In a sense, we are duplicating the process in the Earth that converted algae into oil over the course of millions of years. We’re just doing it much, much faster.“

As our entry five years ago indicated, though (11/25/08, #7), scientists are not really sure how the earth produces crude oil.  Experiments with fungi back then were so efficient at producing fuel from plant matter, a spokesperson said it “calls into question the whole theory of how crude oil was made by nature in the first place.”

When you hear the moyboys tossing around their millions of years recklessly like this, realize they don’t know.  They never experienced a hundred years, let alone a million.  They are just creatures of habit, breathing out their assumptions like smokers puffing smoke.  How long does it take to make oil?  Minutes.  Was there plant material after the Flood?  Lots of it.  Was there heat and pressure?  Plenty.  If you like your science built on empirical data, there it is.