Well, I'm an engineer, not a geologist, but my understanding
is that oil tends to get formed in sea bottoms, rather than
on land (on top of the continental plates), where coal
formation is more likely. The conditions of sea formation,
from masses of dead plankton, would tend to lend themselves
to sealing in the hydrogen. Various stages of coal formation
(swamps, peat bogs, lignite, etc) are commonly found near
the surface on land, gradually getting compressed and reducing
their water content. Of course, over geologic time, most deep-sea
bottoms tend to get subducted down into the
earth's mantle, so oil is comparatively scarce on land or in
shallow water. The Atlantic Ocean is _only_ about forty
million years old, whereas the major fossil fuel sources
are likely to be a couple of hundred million years
old. Synfuel plants (Fischer-Tropf Process, Hydrocarb
Process, etc.) which convert coal to oil, do so by simulating the
conditions of temperature and pressure which would obtain if
some organic matter were trapped about a mile down. In
looking for natural sources of oil, you would be looking for the
fairly rare condition where a piece of sea bottom
wound up on dry land, buried to the right depth, and
then, of course, you would be looking for a rock dome
to contain it. The big point, however, is that you can
always cook coal into liquid fuel if you want
to, so you don't have to rely on geological accidents. You don't
even need coal-- you can use biomass if you like. When you take
account of externalities, synfuel is almost certainly cheaper than
natural oil. Of course, it probably makes sense to go
further, to electrically-powered transportation, in which case you
don't need liquid fuel.
http://postmanpatel.blogspot.com/2006/07/chinese-announce-biomass-bio-oil.html
As it happened, the oil companies were formed by people who
were rather like real estate speculators, or stock
arbitragers, and their orientation was to find some place
where they could buy oil rights at a ridiculously low
price, in order to sell at a high price. The did
not have the mentality of, say, a public utility company, or
the Army Corps of Engineers. This meant that the oil companies
would inevitably wind up in some kind of thieves' market.
Russia is the latest thieves' market. The game is about making off
with state property at less than replacement cost, with the
assistance of Russians who want to escape from Russia.
The peak oil theory has some anachronistic baggage. It
incorporates a hydraulic model of an oil well and drilling
rig-- as they existed in the late 1950's when the theory was
formulated. Nowadays, there are smart drilling rigs, which
can easily steer to exact locations underground, using
sonar to find their way. Such a drilling rig can honeycomb a
well with all kinds of collection galleries, seek out and
intercept natural channels within the rock, etc., and can do all
this at quite low cost. A smart drilling rig cannot create
oil where there is no oil, but it can make the business of
collecting it much more like taking goods out of a
warehouse. There is no longer any close relationship between
current production and ultimate reserves. It is simply a question
of how many years the owner of the oil well prefers to
empty it in. If the owner is at all secretive, you cannot
infer with any confidence how many years worth of oil he has left.
If he wants to increase production at an exponential pace, and
then, suddenly, without warning, run out completely,
he can do just that.
What impresses me about Engdahl is that he is seeking for
mathematical certainty about something which primarily involves
the motives of other people. That puts him in the same basket as
the "peak-oilers." That is, Engdahl says that the
Russians are selling a lot of oil, and therefore they must
have found an inexhaustible supply, and therefore the theory
of "deep," or abiotic oil must be correct. A contrary
interpretation would run as follows, that Russians are notoriously
good "quick and dirty" engineers, with an eye to the main chance,
and they may very well have figured out that there is a time
limit to sell oil by, what with things like the
ongoing growth of electronic communications, the spread of
computerized manufacturing, the increasing importance of
ecological concerns, etc. It may be that the Russians, looking
beyond the current crisis, are determined to unload their oil
while it is still worth something.
The net effect of the 1970's oil crisis was to substantially
insulate the country's electricity supply from foreign affairs.
Once the current oil crisis has run its course, the probable
result will be to insulate the transportation energy
supply from foreign affairs.
[2023 Postscript: The foregoing was written, just before the Bakken
Oil Formation took off. By now, the United States is a net exporter
of all the major forms of fossil fuel, viz: coal,oil, and natural
gas. If we wanted, we could set up a system of trade restrictions to
immunize our internal energy prices against the world market, but if
we did that, the Europeans would never fight well again. ]