I have read about Gold and for years I have read about the Russians who claim to to be producing abiotic oil from super deep wells. However, Russian production has been down or flat. Moreover, no one has been able to produce oil that does not contain biotic material and very, very few have been able to produce oil that does not contain markers of its source rock or reservoir rock.
In order to accept abiotoc oil theory you not only have to disregard all existing data in geology and chemistry but you also have to believe that the entire oil industry is involved in a mass conspiracy.
In regard to your statement:
“...abiotoc oil theory you not only have to disregard all existing data in geology and chemistry but you also have to believe that the entire oil industry is involved in a mass conspiracy ........”
Well it wouldn't be the first time scientists have interpreted an entire corpus of data wrong.
Even if Gold was 100% correct you don't have to invoke a “conspiracy theory” to explain industry reluctance to accept it. No radical new theory is embraced immediately by any “community of knowledge”, skepticism is healthy and necessary to keep “nonsense” from creeping in. Also its extremely expensive to explore & drill for oil, if I was the oil industry I wouldn't to reush to embrace this notion either without pretty high thresholds of proof.
(Aside: When I took a course “Exploration Geophysics” course back in the 1970s I seem to remember a ratio of of 1/30 exploration drilling pay off. Each exploration drilling done at a cost of several million dollars. What are today's numbers? Anyone out in FreeperLand know?)
Back to Gold, look at the vast clouds of methane (& other “organics”) in space, that's surely abiotic in origin!
So an abiotic contribution to underground petroleum is at least to me not out of the question and worthy of more study