What conditions must be met for petroleum to accumulate in commercial quantities?
443280
For commercial quantities you will need to find what is called a reservoir. It is a trap that keep oil 'traped'.\nYou need also to have a spongious rock which allows oil to remain in a same place.\netc....\n\nYou can look step by step at this location:\nhttp://www.priweb.org/ed/pgws/systems/energy_capture/capture.html
121087
Very few oil deposits are at 200 feet. These deposits are usually at depths measured in 1000's of feet. Many natural gas deposits are closer to miles below the surface.\n\nSome deposits, like the Canadian tar sands are at the surface.
19923
Read this please: http://www.chevron.com/products/learning_center/crude/
434376
Economic development doesnt preclude, infact it may very soon require, technological forrays into alternative energy production.  A current trend in the commercial sector is that consumers and investors are favoring environmentally friendly corporations.  Therefore, by the economic law of supply and demand, those corporations that avoid environmentally deleterious policies, such as relying on crude oil, will prosper, since they are 'supplying' environmental responsibility, for which demand is currently soaring.  It is shortsightedly immature of us to not move off crude oil quicker, infact.  We underestimate the damage oil does to the health of the worldwide human population, in terms of military repurcussions, adverse health effects, and of course, the environmental consequences.
598452
Been out of the industry for a little while now so cant give you precise figures, but what I can tell you is that North Sea crude is pretty much specialised and is virtually all exported.\n\nThe UK exchequer sells our crude for more than we pay to import generally.\n\nIt is not the type of crude which lends itself to petrol production either.\n\nIt was also pretty badly drilled at the time which means that whilst there is actually quite a lot left, most of it will be to difficult and expensive to be extracted, so the supply is diminishing quickly.
589485
There has simply been a ban on building new refineries for 25 years, and the capacity to refine crude oil has not kept up with demand for gasoline. The supply of crude oil, and crude oil inventories are ample. But the ability for the refineries to produce gasoline from the crude oil is at a maximum, and this time of year some of them shut down for maintenance (30-60 days), so gasoline supplies are even tighter.\n\nIn a free market, no matter the commodity, when Demand is greater than the Supply, the price goes up.
1107450
Hardly. Methane, ethanol (not yet for cars but already viable for power plants), vegetable oil etc.  If we really had to stop burning fossil fuel, the current service stations could distribute the new fuel.  One of the problems with bringing out alternate fuels is that in order to 'compete' with gasoline, it has to be reasonably available to people driving across the country.  Distribution is a tough issue for some of the products.
216504
through a process called "Cracking"\nthis is when you take a larger molecule and crack it into smaller more volatile molecules\nthey use this in oil refineries to turn crude oil into more valuable products
318704
Only if you are the country that is sanctioned. over all the world economy is able to absorb enough of the lost produces.  well except when it comes to Oil.
718532
Negotiating and restricting access to US oil.
561541
Try Reading the END OF OIL by Paul Roberts.\nIt'll run out a darn-sight sooner than we thought!\nOIL companies have/did lie about the amount of oil they have left.\nThe oil that is being pumped now has 2 go thru more refining than ever B4 & is down 2 the amount of Sea water they pump in 2 the fields.\nEverytime a alternative 2 oil is investigated the Oil companies surpress the data.  They R not going 2 give up on oil until every last drop has been extracted & no-one can predict exactly what affect this will have on the Planet. I'm sure that any warnings would proberly supressed by the oil companies 2.
123709
That question can’t be answered until you tell us what we mean by ‘supply’. Oil supplies are measured in 3 basic ways.\n\nThe first type of supply is the liquid crude reserve supply. This is the amount of liquid oil that we absolutely, definitely know we can make a prophet out of at today’s prices and using today’s technology.  We have drilled well into reserve supplies, we know they are there, we know how much and we know the quality. Proven reserves are in the 1017-981 billion barrel range. (See link 1 below)\n\nThe second type is the  liquid crude  resource supply. This is the amount of liquid oil that we know exists in the ground that we can reasonably expect to be able to get to if we need it. We haven’t fully explored resource supplies. There might have been a few test holes drilled and various seismic tests but at the moment it’s not worth doing more detailed investigation because it isn’t profitable enough. Current estimates of world liquid oil resources range from 2, 248 to 3, 896 billion barrels. (See link 2 below).\n\nThen come the non-liquid oil resources. These are massive. They include tar sands and oil shales amongst other things. Although Canada has been profitably extracting sand oil for decades it is less profitable than drilling for liquid crude oil, so nobody has fully explored the extent of sand and shale oil. We know it’s huge, far larger than the amount of liquid crude ever discovered. But just how large is uncertain. Best estimates say that worldwide tar sands amount to 6,200 billion barrels with 890 billion\nbarrels being “recoverable”, while oil shale  in the US alone amounts to some 160,000 billion barrels (see link 3 below).\n\n______________\n>>>> guess-timates put our production peak around 25 years.\n\nNo, they don't. They put our liquid crude peak at around then, but the question asked about all oil, not just liquid crude. The leak for all oil won't come for another 100 years or so.
534139
The oil will become contaminated with hydrocarbons.
306186
Not really.  It's refined from crude oil, which we find in the ground.
732090
The first process is the  finding & the mining process\nafter the mining process the crude oil have to under go a series fractional distillation processes to obtain pure oil \nThe fractional distillation processses is the important processes in the petrolium synthesis.\nWe get different products at different temperatures and conditions.
485595
Petroleum and petroleum products predominantly to the US
37614
ORIGIN AND FORMATION:\n\n Crude oil is formed from accumulations of small organisms, mostly phytoplankton and zooplanton that are buried in sediments in both marine and lacustrine (fresh water) environments. Other organic material is mixed in such as spores, pollen, woody material, and other material such as fecal pellets from marine organisms. These materials often settle through the water into an organic-rich mud that is very low in oxygen (anaerobic) so there are few organisms to feed on the material and it accumulates over long periods of time. Rivers contribute to this process by both delivering large quantities of organic matter, and also large amounts of sediment to bury this organic matter.\n\nOver time these clay-rich sediments are buried under thousands of feet of sediments, dewatered by pressure from the overlying sediment and become shale. As the shale is buried its temperature increases due to geothermal warming. When it reaches temperatures and pressures of 140 degrees F. (60 C) it begins to convert to oil. As temperature increases from continuing burial processes it reachs a temperature where it begins to form natural gas. Both the oil and the gas are gradually expelled from the shale. Typically shales are found in depositional settings where they may be interbedded with sandstones. Sandstones will have higher porosity (more and bigger holes) than shale and the oil and gas will displace salt water that is remaining in the sandstones. Eventually the oil and gas migrates upward through the water and if the overlying structure has formed some sort of a trapping configuration, (like a sandstone overlain by an impervious shale, or a fault that has created a seal against the sandstone, then this becomes an oil reservoir.\n\nA very similar process occurs in carbonate rocks, like limestone and dolomite, except the organic material originates within the carbonate rock in many instances. If the carbonate reef (for example) has been buried by an impervious layer of shale or carbonate mud of a sabkha, it will become an oil reservoir. In other instances, the source of the oil will be a shale that is below the carbonate rocks, and the oil will migrate upward into this reservoir.\n\n\nReference: John M Hunt, 1996, "Petroleum Geochemistry and Geology", W.H. Freeman & Co: New York. 743 pp. \n\n                                  COMPOSITION:\nCrude oil is a complex mixture of many different hydrocarbon compounds and also may contain sulphur and trace amounts of heavy metals. Because of this, different reservoirs of oil can be distinguished and identified using gas chromatography and other methods. It is even possible to identify particles of the original organisms and plant remains under a microscope in some crude oil. The list of hydrocarbon compounds found in crude oil numbers in the hundreds, but here is a list of the most common:\nParaffins:\n  Pentane\n  Hexane\n  Octane\n  Nonane\n  Decane\n\nBranched chain paraffins:\n  2-Methylpentane\n  3- Methylpentane\n  2-Methylhexane\n  3-Methylhexane\n  2-Methylheptane\n  Pristane\n \nCycloparaffins:\n  Methlycyclopentane\n  Cyclohexane\n  Methylcyclohexane\n  1,2-Dimethylcyclopentane\n  1,3- Dimethylcyclopentane\n  1,3-dimethylcyclohexane\n\nAromatics:\n  Benzene\n  Toluene\n  Ethylbenzene\n  m-Xylene\n\nOr described by molecular size, using a common crude oil for an example:\n  Gasoline (C5-C10)  27%\n  Kerosine (C11-C13) 13%\n  Diesel fuel (C14-C18) 12%\n  Heavy gas oil (C19-C25)10%\n  Lubricating oil (C26-C40)20%\n  Residuum(>C40)                   18% \n\nThere is an interesting thing about biomarkers in oil. There are petroleum reservoirs offshore West Africa, and offshore Brazil, that came from the same source of oil, showing that the oil formed before Africa and South America were separated by the Atlantic Ocean.