Origin of Petroleum on Earth

Abstract

Although I had a long and sometimes fruitful association with NASA, and several people on my staff worked under NASA contracts, it became clear to me that this alliance had to come to an end. I decided to return to my longtime occupation of tackling outstanding problems in various fields of science. Among those, earth sciences were the most interesting to me at that time, and I became fascinated by the origin of petroleum, which is an important subject for many branches of science, such as geology and geochemistry, but also for technology and economics. I thought that it would have received the intense interest of scientists concerned with these fields. But in the developed countries, there is hardly any debate in this field; the majority opinion has declared it as solved. Biological debris buried in the sediments is supposed to decay into oil in the long course of time, and this oil is then supposed to become concentrated in the pore spaces of sedimentary rocks. The search for oil is conducted with this biogenic origin theory in mind, so that the presence or absence of biological material in the sediments was regarded as a key item. When I entered this field, very few boreholes were drilled into the basement rocks that had frozen from a melt, since there could be no biological sediments in those, and it was thought that they could not contain any oil. This belief then resulted, inevitably, in almost all oil being produced from sediments.