a matter of debate since its discovery1. Nevertheless, during the last several dec ades it was firmly believed that the ori gin of petroleum hydrocarbons is 'biogenic' (fossil fuel), a hypothesis that was first ... existence of thermophile bacteria in the earth's crust, which perhaps resulted in

Oil reservoirs, mines, and geothermal aquifers are examples of subsurface environments that thermophiles populate. Extreme thermophilic bacterial species of the genera Geotoga and Petrotoga (family Thermotogaceae) have so far only been found in deep subsurface oil reservoirs; on this basis, it has been proposed that these taxa represent typical indigenous Bacteria of this particular ecosystem.

Some thermophilic bacteria, such as Moorella glycerini (Slobodkin et al., 1997), Thermoanaerobacter wiegelii (Cook et al., 1996), and Pseudothermotoga lettingae (Balk et al., 2002), have been described to grow in pure culture with glycerol, but the thermophilic conversion of glycerol by mixed communities (Zhang et al., 2015).

The abiogenic petroleum origin hypothesis proposes that most of earth's petroleum and natural gas deposits were formed inorganically, commonly known as abiotic oil. [1] Scientific evidence overwhelmingly supports a biogenic origin for most of the world's petroleum deposits. [2][3] Mainstream theories about the formation of hydrocarbons on earth ...

Odell (1999) later mentions how abiotic oil could lead to an increasing or potentially everlasting availability of petroleum. Tsatskin and Balaban (2008) even claim that the present peak oil debate is underpinned by a biogenic paradigm of oil formation.

The peak oil debate is underpinned by a biological paradigm of oil formation that generates a notion of fixed oil and gas reserves in the Earth's crust. However, the potential of the abiogenic theory of oil formation is underestimated. We will demonstrate the value of modern petroleum science based on a thermodynamic understanding of ...