Unconventional Oil

Cooking with beet oil. Keeping your skin soft with baby oil...made from actual babies. Both examples of unconventional oils.

In this case, though, we're talking about the kind of oil you turn into gasoline: crude oil. The line between conventional and unconventional doesn't relate to the oil itself so much. Instead, it refers to how we extract that oil.

Conventional oil comes through the conventional method. You drill down into the ground and...suck it up. Unconventional oil comes through other methods. Think: oil sands, where oily dirt is scooped up and the oil is filtered out.