If you look at coal, the plants are there in your hands, right before you eyes. To state otherwise is preposterous balderdash.
When I was a kid and we had a coal furnace in the basement, I’d dig through the coal bin and find large lumps with beautiful fern and sea lily imprints and set them aside to save.
Dad, being perpetually oblivious would, without fail, toss them into the furnace while I was asleep or in school.
“Hydrocarbon-rich areas tend to be hydrocarbon-rich at many different levels [in the earth], corresponding to quite different geological epochs, and extending down to the crystalline basement that underlies the sediment. An invasion of an area by hydrocarbon fluids from below could better account for this than the chance of successive deposition.” (6) Also, such extrusion of hydrocarbons periodically over time from below could explain the findings of organic debris, such as ferns, saber tooth tigers, and even human fossil skulls, in seams of coal (think La Brea tar pits in Los Angeles, California). Gold writes: “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. A hard, brittle coal is not going to get into each cell of a delicate leaf without destroying it. So obviously that stuff was a thin liquid at one time which gradually hardened…[p]etroleum…gradually becomes stiffer and harder [and] that is the only logical explanation for the origin of coal. 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.” (6)--(6) Thomas Gold: “The Origin of Methane (and Oil) in the Crust of the Earth, USGS Professional Paper 1570, The Future of Energy Gasses, 1993, available at: http://people.cornell.edu/pages/tg21/usgs.html.