Is petroleum renewable

Answer 1

Petroleum is a broad term for the various purified hydrocarbon fuels that are derived, usually via fractional distillation, from naturally occurring deposits of crude oil and gas. Although there are many means of extracting these chemicals and purifying them to a form usable as fuel by humans, they are typically extracted from the Earth via drilling for these deposits, which were formed over many thousands of years via the geologic forces of pressure and heat acting on decaying vegetable and animal matter. It is from these initial sources that petroleum fuels have gained the name "fossil fuels". Petroleum fuels are not renewable sources of energy for the same reason that nuclear fuels are non-renewable; while the processes for creating these fuels from base chemicals are known and understood, the processes for creating them require pressures and temperatures unattainable except on a very small scale, and much more energy must be put in to creating them artificially than can possibly be extracted from the fuels created.