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This is about microbes that break oil down, not create it.

That is the point of view of the article. Simply because the authors say the microbes in question break down petroleum, are we to blindly accept the premise? Obviously they are not considering the opposite point of view, which is that the microbes are eating methane and crapping out oil, or leaving behind more complex hydrocarbons as a result of their deaths. And besides, if they are eating the petroleum, why is the petroleum still there? They had plenty of time to eat all th petroleum before we started drilling for it.

Certainly a rudimentary understanding of microbiology is in order. I will use two examples from real life.

First, e Coli: It lives in our intestines, and breaks down the remnants of food after it has been acted upon by acids and enzymes in the digestive tract. What you see when you have a BM is fully 50% e Coli bacteria, by weight. Gross, but illustrative. Are the e Coli eating crap, or making it? Second, beer: Beer is made from sugar which is mixed into water and fed to yeasts, which are unicellular organisms somewhat more advanced evolutionarily than e Coli. They eat the sugar and crap out alcohols and carbon dioxide, and also leave behind some other chemical compounds that are responsible for some of the flavors of beer, like the banana taste of Heffeweizen. Are they eating beer, or making it?

At any rate, Thomas Gold postulated a biological process whereby methane, which is one carbon and three hydrogens, is eaten by some unknown microorganism in the crust of the Earth, and a byproduct of their lives is actually a variety of hydrocarbons which we call petroleum.

It isn't outrageous to conceive of such organisms, since there are all sorts of microorganisms that live in very diverse temperature ranges. Some interesting microorganisms live quite happily in the hot pools in Yellowstone which will boil the skin off of a human in seconds flat.

This discovery actually provides evidence in favor of Gold's hypothesis: the microbes that they are talking about here show that microbes exist in petroleum. So they found them, and came up with a theory more in line with the "squashed dinosaurs" theory of petroleum genesis. It doesn't surprise me one bit that they go right along with the consensus theory.

So regardless of what you might think is nonsense, it would be scientifically responsible to consider the possibility that Thomas Gold might have been on to something. I suspect that Gold was a whole lot smarter when he was alive than you will ever be, with all due respect to your particular academic credentials.