Oil forms when organic material – the remains of living things – gets compressed and heated under layers of sediment.
Some social media users are claiming this process occurs as quickly as the substance can be extracted.
Oil "regenerates within the Earth faster than it could ever be depleted," reads a July 5 Facebook post.
The post was shared more than 1,000 times in a month.
But it's wrong.
Oil takes millions of years to form, according to researchers. Conditions on modern Earth do not support replenishment at the rate that it is being extracted.
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USA TODAY reached out to the social media users who shared the claim for comment.
It takes millions of years for oil to form, according to the Energy Information Administration.
"It won’t replenish in a human lifetime," Jonathan Redfern, a professor and head of Petroleum Geoscience and Basin Studies at the University of Manchester told USA TODAY in an email. "Many (oil) fields – in the USA – have been depleted for decades. They haven’t refilled."
The environmental conditions and organic material required to keep pace with contemporary oil extraction could not realistically be supplied by Earth's ecosystems, according to Jeffery Dukes, a global ecology researcher at the Carnegie Institution for Science.
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