He's brilliant at self-promotion and self-delusion.
Gold knows jack-squat about petroleum. Every proposed test of his "primitive methane" hypothesis has turned up craps -- he sold the Swedish government on a test of it back in the 1980's, to deep-drill a test hole in ancient, pre-Cambrian crystalline rocks (Sweden has no natural petroleum-generating sediments, so they were ripe pickings for Gold's snake-oil). After expending tens of millions of dollars, with absolutely nothing to show for it but some trace, crustal gases, they finally abandoned the hole. Gold, of course, claimed that the results vindicated his idea. The Swedish government, as stupidly socialist as they are, nevertheless knew bilge when they heard it and sent Tommy-boy packing.
Gold has an even less distinguished record in lunar science -- remember the "deep oceans of dust" that the Lunar Modules were supposed to sink into? That's another brilliant Gold insight.
Yes, he was right about the origin of pulsars -- even a blind pig finds an acorn occasionally.
Tommy Gold -- pernicious fraud. He belongs at Cornell.
"...Drilling deep into the crystalline granite of Sweden between 1986 and 1993 revealed substantial amounts of natural gas and oil. 80 barrels of oil were pumped up from a depth between 5.2 km and 6.7 km.
Russian petroleum geologists followed this operation closely. Dr. P.N. Kropotkin reported at a meeting in Moscow that the discovery of oil deep in the Baltic Shield may be considered a decisive factor in the hundred year old debate about the biogenic or abiogenic origin of oil. This discovery was made in deep wells that were drilled in the central part of the crystalline Baltic Shield, on the initiative of T. Gold.
Drilling into crystalline bedrock is now underway in Russia on a large scale. More than 300 wells have been drilled to a depth of more than 5 km and are productive, as also is the giant White Tiger field offshore Vietnam, mostly producing also from basement rock."
From NASA's website on the history of the debate
"...Now let me turn to Gold' s deep dust model. If one actually reads what Gold said in his paper (Gold, 1955, Mon. Not. Roy. Astr. Soc., 115, 585), rather than what some NASA geologists say he said, one finds that it is a carefully reasoned, logical model that was fully consistent with the observations known at that time. Gold argued that (1) the Moon had always been a cold body, (2) the craters were of impact origin, (3) the maria were deposits of material eroded from the surrounding highlands and carried into depressions by an electrostatic transport process, and (4) there was a darkening process operating on the lunar surface that lowered the albedo of material exposed at the surface This model was considered to be a less likely but, nevertheless, credible possibility by most persons outside the NASA Astrogeology group, including Harold Urey, a Nobel Prize winning scientist and the father of modern planetary and meteorite chemistry.
...The notion that the maria deposits were so unconsolidated that a spacecraft would sink out of sight in them was not a part of the original model, nor was it essential to it...
...At the time we published the paper, we considered it to be a significant breakthrough because it showed that the Moon had a fine powdery surface. Of course, after the Apollo landings everyone said that they knew all along that the lunar surface was covered with a fine-grained regolith (e.g., Wilhelms, To a Rocky Moon). However, actual accounts from that period tell a rather different story. Gene Shoemaker was quoted in an article in National Geographic (circa 1963) as saying that the surface was covered with cobbles (fist-sized chunks of rock). I still have a copy of the cover of the Houston telephone directory (circa 1964), which was a NASA publicity photo showing a spacesuited astronaut walking on the NASA geologists' best guess of the Lunar surface: volcanic ash consisting of centimeter-sized rocks. Following the Soviet Luna 9 landings, Gerard Kuiper, the preeminent planetary astronomer of his time, held a news conference in which he proclaimed that the surface was obviously volcanic aa lava, adding that this would "tear an astronaut's boots to shreds". Even after the unmanned Surveyor landings on the moon, the NASA geologists continued to insist that the regolith was course-grained.
...Finally, it should be emphasized that many aspects of Gold's model are correct, after all. The craters are of impact origin. While the maria did turn out to be lava flows, the flow surfaces are buried under several meters of dust. There are, indeed, erosional and depositional processes operating on the lunar surface, including electrostatic levitation, although these processes are not as efficient as Gold hypothesized. And there is ample evidence for his predicted darkening process, which today is called "space weathering". I think it is time for the devil to be given his due."