Some key points:

 

- Rockefeller team coined or created term 'fossil fuel' to create a tone of scarcity in late 1800s (and drive up price).

- Actual fossils are found only down to around 16,000 feet underground.

- Oil is found well below the fossil line - down to 30,000 feet.

I don't know about the actual name "fossil fuels" but the theory that coal and petroleum are the product of decayed plant and animal remains has been around since at least the 16th century.

 

I also can't verify that "16,000 foot" number anywhere that's not a website promoting the abiogenetic hypothesis. I don't know anything at all about minerology or geology but at depths of 16,000 feet, you'd have to imagine that high pressures and temperatures are starting to cause metamorphism, right? Meaning that any fossils at that depth would be destroyed.

The world was flat at one point too.

More.

 

This guy focuses on serpentinization.

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Serpentinization:

 

Serpentinization

Serpentinization as it could impact life on Mars.

 

Life on Mars? >> American Scientist

 

 

Sharma was familiar with the slate of suspects, having taught for several years a class called "Life on Mars?" But he believed the simplest of all these potential explanations to be an inorganic chemical reaction known as serpentinization.

 

Here on Earth, "there are several places on the continents and in the ocean basins where abiotic methane is being produced by serpentinization reactions," Sharma says. The process requires the mineral olivine, water, carbon dioxide and some catalysts—all well documented to be present on Mars.

 

Serpentinization had already entered the flurry of possibilities that scientists put forward, but no one had worked out how the reaction could produce the levels of methane that had been observed in the Martian atmosphere.

So, Sharma and a colleague, Dartmouth postdoctoral fellow Chris Oze, set out to calculate just how easy it would be for serpentinization to produce the gas.

 

Olivine hides out in what geochemists call ultramafic rock—rock high in magnesium- and iron-containing olivine and pyroxenes, which are silicate minerals. During serpentinization, Sharma explains, water attacks olivine and alters it to another mineral, called serpentine. At the same time, the hydrogen molecules are cleaved from the water. In the presence of certain catalysts, those hydrogen molecules combine with the carbon from carbon dioxide to form methane (CH₄).

Been saying that for years.

Never made sense to me that all oil came from fossilized anything.

A WHOLE lot of debate on this issue.

Abiogenic petroleum origin - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[h=3]Incidental arguments for abiogenic oil[edit][/h]Given the known occurrence of methane and the probable catalysis of methane into higher atomic weight hydrocarbon molecules, various abiogenic theories consider the following to be key observations in support of abiogenic hypotheses:

 

• the serpentinite synthesis, graphite synthesis and spinel catalysation models prove the process is viable^[21][38]
  
• the likelihood that abiogenic oil seeping up from the mantle is trapped beneath sediments which effectively seal mantle-tapping faults^[37]
  
• outdated^{[citation needed]} mass-balance calculations^[when?] for supergiant oilfields which argued that the calculated source rock could not have supplied the reservoir with the known accumulation of oil, implying deep recharge.^[10][11]
  
• the presence of hydrocarbons encapsulated in diamonds ^[63]
  

The proponents of abiogenic oil also use several arguments which draw on a variety of natural phenomena in order to support the hypothesis:

 

• the modeling of some researchers shows the Earth was accreted at relatively low temperature, thereby perhaps preserving primordial carbon deposits within the mantle, to drive abiogenic hydrocarbon production^[64]
  
• the presence of methane within the gases and fluids of mid-ocean ridge spreading centre hydrothermal fields^[65]
  
• the presence of diamond within kimberlites and lamproites which sample the mantle depths proposed as being the source region of mantle methane (by Gold et al.).^[29]