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Peat - Yes. (And its formed new in beds that are only a few hundred years old.) Coal. Yes. (Somewhat hard to make in the lab, but it's been done.) But never oil. And coal is found in wide beds at genreally very, very shallow depths (50' to 150' underground) in massive layers that are NOT 15,000 feet deep.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I thougth the Nazis had successfully converted coal to oil and refined it to fuel. Also, you statements about coal don't disprove, but support the hypothesis. Biomass that did not undergo the pressure of deep core depths did not complete the transformation to oil. Also, oil has been found in may places at much shallower depths than 15,000 feet. In the 1800's it actually oozed to the surface in Pennsylvania and many of those wells were only a few hundred feet deep.

Spindletop is the name of a small knoll just south of Beaumont Texas.

Anthony Lucas, an Austrian-born mining engineer, has been supervising the drilling of an oilwell since October 27, 1900.

His crew must install a new drilling bit on the string of a drill pipe. The date is January 10, 1901. The drilling crew begins lowering the new bit to the bottom of the hole. They run about 700 feet (200 meters) of drill pipe into the 1,000-foot (300-meter) hole. Suddenly, the well starts spewing drilling mud. The mud, a liquid concoction that carries rock cuttings out of the hole, drenches the rig floor and shoots up into the derrick.

The crew evacuates the rig and waits to see what will happen. The flow stops. The workers return to the rig and start cleaning up. Without warning, mud erupts again. Then a geyser of oil gushes 200 feet (60 meter) above the 60-foot-high (18 meter high) derrick.

http://sln.fi.edu/fellows/fellow2/jan99/spindletop.html

The difference is the sheer number of very shallow, very extensive (thousands of thousands of coal beds across many states - most available econimically (!) at less than 200 under the topsoil. Even "deep" underground mines seldom go past 1000 feet to get to the coal seams. Oil, in very, very limited at "surface pools - though they are present (as a La Brea Tar Pits in LA, and the surface "seeps" you mentioned in PA. But oil ISN'T/HASN'T ever been typically discovered at 100 foot levels, nor even at 1000 foot levels.

So: How did the "oil-productive" plants get 10,000 to 15,000 feet deep? How did they get under the sea beds in such wide areas - when many of these regions are on "stable" continental shelves; not getting shalloer or deeper since the Cambrian days.

If the coal beds came from the earliest Cambrian era swamps (and of course fossiles and plant matter in the coal prove dates very accurately).... where/when did the "plants/microbes/methane (?) that formed the oil fields come from ..... how did it get so deep?

Yes - Coal was converted to oil in Germany: Process is to take the coal hydrocarbons, and heat them (under controlled conditions of temperatures and pressure) so the coal (individual carbon atoms) breaks down in the presence of free hydrogen and recombines into hydrocarbon strings .... these become the "oil" molecules you mentioned.

So - If coal (under natural conditions) is to mimic this process: Then there must be a continuos, massive source of free hydrogen molecules passing through over and around the coal .... not just a little bit either: but enough to so that at least two H atoms (not as gassous H2 either!) are present for each C atom.

Result, of course, is going to depnd on what liquids and what light gasses form: methane, ethane, ethanols, etc. would all result from different numbers of free H atoms available to react. But if free H atoms are present ... why atay near the coal bed? Wouldn't you expect them to float away?

Perhaps the surface "pre-coal" swamps DID have the hydrogen float away ... and ONLY the extremely deep deposits were "captured" under enough rock to trap enough hydrogen to react with the pro-coal molecules under enough pressure. ?