HAS the oil industry been exploring in the wrong places? Geochemists in
California are claiming that our ideas about how oil forms are mistaken, meaning
all bets are off about where to look for new deposits.
Oil forms from source rocks called black shale, which are made from organic
matter that settled on the ocean floor and was then compressed. Once organic
matter decays, it dissolves into the seawater and doesn’t accumulate. So
researchers always assumed that black shale would be found in places where life
once thrived in the ocean, but where a lack of oxygen near the seabed…
