Corsi claims that laboratory transformation of organic matter into oil is missing, and that “kerogen” is essentially mythical. Response:

the “lack of proof” of the biogenic theory of oil formation is only apparent, not real. It is only an effect of the internet bias that tends to hide the scientific literature produced before the 1980s-1990s. The earliest successful laboratory tests to transform organic matter into oil were carried out in 1913 by the German chemist Engler. The laboratory demonstration of all the steps of the standard biogenic theory was done in a series of studies carried out by the American Petroleum Institute (API) in the 1930s -1940s. These early studies are not easy to find even in academic libraries and many petroleum geologists seem to know these results only as they are presented in later textbooks. However, this is no more an indication of a scientific conspiracy than seeing physicists calculate spacecraft trajectories without having read Newton’s Principia.

However, transforming organic matter into oil is not something that occurs only in old and dusty academic journals; reports on this point can be found on the internet. Unfortunately, internet search engines are tricky, even treacherous. So, looking for “proof of the biological theory of oil formation,” it is easy to miss the fact that making oil from organic substances not only was done in the lab in the past, but that it is done all the time and has been done commercially since the mid 19th century! The process that produces oil from the pyrolysis of its organic precursor (”kerogen”) can be reproduced in the lab in a common test set-up called “rock evaluation” (rock eval for short) invented in 1977 and commonly carried out to characterize the oil producing potential of rocks. It is also possible to make commercial amounts of oil from the same organic precursor that commonly occurs in shales; the product is called “shale oil.” The process is expensive and the amounts of commercially produced shale oil never were comparable to those of conventional oil. Still it was done, and it is being done in limited amounts today.

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Indeed, a search for rock evaluation produces some interesting results.

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