Biology 2217B Lecture Notes - Lecture 7: Ordovician, Protist, Biogas
18 Sep 2019
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Document Summary
From terrestrial plant communities of the carboniferous period, 362-290 mya and also the cretaceous, ~140 mya: oil and natural gas. From communities of marine plankton - protista and red and green algae - from ~500- 150 mya, ordovician through jurassic periods: you can see how the distillation of a barrel of oil can give us a lot of products. Geological time scale: you can see when many of the plants we have came about, dotted line = extinction event. Peat: deposits of vegetable matter, accumulated in bogs and swamps, slowly decomposed, carbonized and compacted, plant tissues can still be discerned, valuable where wood is scarce. Leaves produce 5 to 15 x as much ash. Low sulfur anthracite is best (hardest and purest: bituminous coal is most common worldwide, coal produces great amounts of co2 and so2, recovery of co2 is more difficult / impractical, and co2 a major greenhouse gas.
