A Small Conundrum

The National Academy of Sciences estimates that around 600,000 metric tons of oil per year seeps into the ocean naturally, with estimates ranging from 200,000 to 2,000,000 metric tons per year. Plugging the 600,000 estimate through some conversions and that comes to 4.4 million barrels a year. World oil reserves are thought by some to have amounted to about 2 trillion barrels, with about 900 billion barrels already consumed from 1860 to present. This and this brings up some interesting questions.

They're telling us we're about to run out, using roughly 44 billion barrels a year, with enough maybe for a few more decades, possibly a century. Either way, we're only pumping oil at 3,000 to 30,000 times the rate that it was naturally leaking anyway, and that's only including oceanic leaking that we know about. There's no reason to believe this leak rate was any less in the distant past, and indeed it was likely higher since there would've been more to leak, in theory, and we had continual periods of continental collision, drift, and major upheavals to keep putting cracks in the bedrock.

This brings me to a conundrum. At 4.4 million barrels per year of natural seepage, the 2 trillion barrels of reserves would've leaked out in just 454,000 years. Yet they say the oil has been down there for 600 million years. By my numbers any such oil would've leaked out by around 599.55 million years ago. Somebody's theory or numbers has to be way off base, no? You can fudge the numbers quite a bit, but this one needs a correction factor of over a thousand fold. So isn't that interesting?