Also found this blurb from a 1997 a Toledo Blade article:
"...Millions of Americans learned in grade school that oil deposits originated in the age of dinosaurs, when vegetation in lush forests was buried and subjected to high heat and pressure. Those extreme conditions supposedly transformed the hydrocarbons in vegetation into the hydrocarbons of petroleum.
"That's nonsense," snapped Thomas Gold, a scientist at Cornell University. "There's not a shred of evidence from chemistry, geology, or any other science to support it. It has no place in textbooks and school classrooms."
Petroleum originating from plant matter decayed by bacteria, similar to bacteria that decay backyard garden-compost piles, would resemble a microbial product. Instead, petroleum is chemically similar to a pure hydrocarbon that has been contaminated with microbial material. That contamination, he argues, occurred as petroleum seeped upward through rock now known to contain enormous amounts of bacterial life. In moving upward, petroleum also collected helium, explaining why oil wells are such a rich source of helium. "This is the only possible explanation," Gold said. "The association of helium with petroleum has not been accounted for in any other way."
Gold also presented evidence that oil and gas deposits on Earth are primordial. That means they came with the planet. They were part of the original raw material that formed the sun and planets, and deposited deep below Earth's surface when the planet formed 4.5 billion years ago."