Scientists believe there's a chance to solve the problem of future oil and natural gas shortages, by creating new reserves in a short time that could be regarded as just a flash compared to how much is believed to take for oil to form underground.

Although there is no effective way of doing that just yet, Jennifer McIntosh, a geochemist from the University of Arizona in Tucson, thinks that by understanding some unusual processes that create fossil fuels, we could one day devise a way of replicating their formation in just a nick of time.

He thinks that natural gas may not take millions of years to form, as it is generally believed and says that under specific conditions, the formation process can be rapidly accelerated. This could mean that one day we could start producing natural gas instead of extracting it.

Oil could be produced the same way, but natural gas would be preferred, since it burns cleaner than other fossil fuels, such as oil and coal and produces less greenhouse gas per unit energy released. For an equivalent amount of heat, burning natural gas produces about 30% less carbon dioxide than burning petroleum and about 45% less than burning coal in similar applications.

He bases his beliefs on a strange pocket of gas located in the New York state, out of which over 1.5 billion cubic meters of natural gas were extracted last year. He is trying to prove that the deposit was actually created during the past 18,000 years by methane-making microbes, or methanogens, a huge advance over what was thought to be a really slow process.

"Ultimately, the goal is to understand how microbes make methane and how to speed up that process," says McIntosh. "Biogenic gas is a huge energy resource that could potentially be renewable on a human timescale."