Fossil Fuels for Freelancing Dummies

Fossil fuels

One of the AN staffers briefly "contributed" to eHow.com, and is a veritable font of information about the site. The journalist types in charge published a blacklist of sites that could not be cited as references, a list that ultimately included all Demand Media sites. It's weird when you can't trust your own content, right? We suspect contributor Cara Batema started with some less-than-trustworthy content from a sister site for her post, "What Do Fossil Fuels Look Like?" for Sciencing.com.

We think so because we saw pretty much the same level of bogosity in a Robert Balun article at the mother site, not to mention some of the same misconceptions. Then again, maybe Bobby ripped off Cara: who knows? The issue is that both of them got way too much wrong.
Wrong like this introduction from Batema:

"The three major fossil fuels -- coal, oil and natural gas -- were formed hundreds of millions of years ago from dead organic matter."

She got the names right and the "organic matter" bit right (though "dead" is demonstrably redundant), but not all fossil fuels were formed "hundreds of millions of years ago." For instance, a major source of the oil in the Gulf of Mexico is less that 60 million years old, and none of it is more than 200 million years old. In a related post, Batema claimed that all fossil fuels are sourced in Carboniferous rocks. Duh.

Batema also thinks that oil formed from "[Sea] organisms called diatoms that died and fell to the sea floor." Oddly, Balun told his reader that, "Oil is a dark liquid composed of diatoms..." So, which came first: the dummy or the plagiarist? Some more of Cara's misinformation:

"...fossil fuels like oil shale contain bituminous materials, or heavy black oil, that can be used as a source of energy."

No, Cara, oil shale is not currently usable as a fossil fuel. That's because oil shale does not contain oil, it is rich in the kerogens that are a precursor to oil. You've apparently conflated oil shale with tar sands, which do contain bitumen; heavy black oil similar to tar, hence their name.

"Oil shale formed in these cases because the heat and pressure was not great enough to create coal or oil."

Substantially correct, although Cara appears to have been unaware that the third component necessary to convert kerogen to oil is time. Oh, and the organic material in oil shale (the actual thing)? It would never become coal.

Given ignorance like that, this music-major graduate should never have been writing about fossil fuels – but she did. That's why Cara is the lucky recipient of today's Dumbass of the Day award.

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