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A lot longer than you might think! To make hydrocarbons, you need organic material and we know that there was marine life dating back 570 million years ago in the Cambrian period. Most of our hydrocarbon's origins do not go back this far, but there are many fields that are from the Paleozoic era (older than 250 million years ago). If organics were deposited 250 million years ago, and all conditions were right, it might take another 20 million years to transform these organics into hydrocarbons. See related link.

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16y ago

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