From ScienceDaily, potentially good news for human beings, and thus potentially bad news for "environmentalists" and other fans of powerful, coercive government:

Researchers at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Stockholm have managed to prove that fossils from animals and plants are not necessary for crude oil and natural gas to be generated. The findings are revolutionary since this means, on the one hand, that it will be much easier to find these sources of energy and, on the other hand, that they can be found all over the globe.

Gee, no kidding. But don't worry: I would expect this seemingly-crucial discovery, and any independent confirmation, to have no impact whatsoever.

It continually stuns me how dense and primitive we can be — and yet how deeply impressed with ourselves we also are. Astronomers find hydrocarbons on Hyperion (a moon of Saturn), entire lakes of ethane and methane on Titan, and yet those same substances, and their products must be only or primarily products of biological processes on earth? We pump billions of barrels of oil out of a field and it refills — from below — and we don't notice that probably means there's something wrong with our capacity estimates? Oil is found nowhere near sedimentary rock — and almost nobody finds this even remotely interesting?

Of course not. Because "science" is carried out and propagated by people, and people tend to have agendas.

Here's a nice overview of the abiotic oil theory of Thomas Gold. Favorite quote:

The coal we dig is hard, brittle stuff [but] it was once a liquid, because we find embedded in the middle of a six-foot seam of coal such things as a delicate wing of some animal or a leaf of a plant. They are undestroyed, absolutely preserved, with every cell in that fossil filled with exactly the same coal as all the coal on the outside... The fact that coal contains fossils does not prove that it is a fossil fuel; it proves exactly the opposite. Those fossils you find in coal prove that coal is not made from those fossils. How could you take a forest and mulch it all up so that it is a completely featureless big black substance and then find one leaf in it that is perfectly preserved? That is absolute nonsense.