I remember reading an article a decade ago about how oil pumped out of the ground is more likely a byproduct of whatever is going on inside the earths core than it is the remains of ancient forest growth or whatever. That they only thought it was from old growth because it had remains of that kind of stuff in it but now they think the fluid is just picking up that crap as it moves into open areas and cracks underneath the earth’s surface...
-check this out but realize he wasn’t believed by eeverybody—
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Gold
Petroleum
Petra= rock
Oleo=fat/ oil
Petroleum, rock oil.
There are scientific papers on this topic. Mainstream “ knowledge” (science) either ignores it or vilifies it.
The ancients knew something maybe.
There’s two theories on the matter, what you are describing is the “abiogenesis” theory, which isn’t widely accepted right now.
There is some evidence that simple hydrocarbons form in the absence of any biological processes. Saturn’s moon Titan has never had any life on it, and it has a literal sea of methane. Tholins are another category of simple hydrocarbons that are found on several other dead moons where they couldn’t have originated from biomatter. However, we don’t actually have any real evidence that the kind of complex hydrocarbons we find in Earth’s deposits can form naturally without any biological matter as a “starter”. So the theory still has some hurdles to get over.
This is what concerns me about fracking chemicals being pumped into the earth. Will those chemicals prevent creation of more oil?
It's called Abiogenic petroleum. The geologic formations of old sand bars, dead swamps and forests create a trap for the results of fluids formed by high pressure, high heat, methane from when the Earth was formed, water. Let it all simmer for a few billions years, and in some places it forms pools, contaminated by organic matter in these traps, that can be pumped out.
The organic fouling makes the difference between bunker grade, light sweet crude, heavy sour crude.
Micro droplets that miss these traps float up, and are eaten by hosts of microbes under ground. It's why old, capped wells are slowly refilling. It's not instant, but it happens. Crude, after all, is eaten by microbes, after spills. The process takes years, but Nature cleans itself.
Recall that the theory of oil being the product of dead dinosaurs is 200 years old, and planetary formation science has developed a little, since then.