Why are coal oil and natural gas considered nonrenewable resources even though they come from living things that can reproduce?

Answer 1

Good question and you are quite correct.

However, in terms of the existence of the Human species they are indeed non-renewable. Fossil fuels are made from the remains of organisms that lived tens or hundreds of millions of years ago and the remains have taken all of geological time to accumulate in the ground to the point where we can effectively extract them.

I suppose if we waited a few more hundreds of millions of years, present life may have accumulated enough to replenish the fossil fuel supply, but for humanity once we have used all that exist now, they are gone.

Answer 2

Coal, oil, and natural gas are considered nonrenewable resources because they take millions of years to form and cannot be replenished within a human lifetime. While they do originate from living organisms that can reproduce, the rate at which they are extracted far exceeds the rate of their formation, making them unsustainable in the long term.