explain petroleum and natural gas deposit with diagram
Answers
The remaining oil, natural gas, and mineral deposits in the continental United States are concentrated in the American West, where they were created between 40 million and a few hundred million years ago. The abundance of such resources on public lands is a historical confluence of variables: lands that were unsettled and therefore taken by the federal government happen to have been the site, thousands of years ago, of ecosystems that today result in abundant energy resources. Western sites such as Fossil Butte National Monument (Wyoming) and Dinosaur National Monument (Utah) contain the fossilized remains that demonstrate abundant life many yeas ago, both in and out of the sea. Of course, as these ancient plants and animals decomposed over millions of years, extreme heat and pressure transformed them into resources that can be mined and burned to provide energy.
Such nonrenewable sources are just a fraction of the available energy resources. Today, the open space available on much of the federal lands has also become a resource for the development of another type of energy: renewable, including wind, solar, and water power. The U.S. Department of the Interior (USDI) oversees the leasing of lands for this development, including mining. Within USDI, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) manages the development of all fossil fuels and minerals on nearly all of the lands, excluding areas of special jurisdiction such as the Naval Petroleum Reserves and hydroelectric watershed development areas that are administered by the Army Corps of Engineers (see Table II).