Myth: Oil Can Only Be Found In Marine Sediments

While it's certainly true hydrocarbons CAN be found in marine sediments, to suggest that they ONLY can be found in marine sediments is to live in a cocoon of unreality.

When in 1942 Wallace E. Pratt wrote, "We have learned that oil is a normal constituent of marine sedimentary rocks all over the world," he was absolutely right. What he didn't say, and what he should have said though, is "we have learned that oil is a constituent of all 3 classes of rocks (igneous, metamorphic, and sedimentary) and across all strata (from archean to quaternary) all over the world."

"The concentration of source rocks in these several stratigraphic intervals demonstrates uneven distribution of source rocks in time...." -- Klemme & Ulmishek, 1999

"Petroleum, natural gas and bituminous fields or deposits cannot be regarded as anything else but the products of solfotaric volcanic emanations condensed and held in their passage upward in the porous tanks of all ages of the crust of the earth from the Archaean rocks to the Quaternary. Nothing is so simple and therefore nothing so natural as this origin, and we shall see that it can be abundantly proven." -- Eugene Coste, 1903

In other words, oil is a magmatic xenolith (so to speak) brought to the surface by subaerial eruptions, namely upper mantle plumes.

How else can one explain the sulfur content in crude oil? Sulfur is an abiotic element and therefore no more biogenic than oxygen. Although sulfate-reducing bacteria such as salmonella and archaeoglobus leave behind hydrogen sulfide as a byproduct, this type of metabolism is called dissimilatory, since sulfur is not incorporated - assimilated - into any organic compounds."