Thinking Aloud About Oil
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Oil is plant matter subjected to heat, pressure and time, right? So if you pulled all the weeds in your yard and put them in a pressure cooker, you should get oil. Eventually.
Of course, you would use more oil heating the pressure cooker than you would get from your weeds. But what if you used a solar powered pressure cooker? Let's ;leave that there for a bit and go on to Things I Have Directly Observed.

I once had a back yard measuring 50'X 140'. I paid a man $10 per cut to mow the lawn, averaging 10 cuts per growing season. The lawn clippings were dumped in a corner of the yard. The next spring I had a big pile of dirt with a 1/2 inch layer of lawn clippings on top. There was enough dirt to plant a 20'X 30' garden.

Several years later, my mom bought five 20lb bags of hardwood mulch (not cedar). The bags were black. She used 3 of them and left the other two sitting in the garden all summer. The next spring, we opened the bags. What had been mulch 8 months ago was now soil and a few wood bits. We tilled it into her garden and didn't need to fertilize the area for at least 3 years. Her plants flourished.

When I bought my current house, I built a bin out of chicken wire and dumped in all my grass clippings, leaves and tree branches. I never stirred it. Nor did I add any chemicals to help it break down. I just dumped stuff on the top and removed the dirt that fell out of the bottom. The chicken wire lasted 2 years before it started falling apart. I had enough dirt to level my back yard. I also had a lot of worms and a lot of happy birds.

Yet, none of these methods produced noticeable oil. But you can get oil from plants, right? Isn't that what vegetable oil is? So where does the oil go?
Heck if I know.

What I do know is that petroleum and methane go hand in hand. And from what I've read in scientific journals that I barely understand, some bacteria "eat" methane and "poop" heavy hydrocarbons. So I speculate that bacteria are required for petroleum production. Yay, bacteria!

Now here's where it gets weird: Petroleum can be found in meteorites. Not in the kind of quantities we have on Earth; but it exists nonetheless. Also, in order to run your car or make a Ziploc bag; petroleum must be broken down to lighter hydrocarbons. (fuel oil, naptha, ethylene, propylene, butadiene, benzene, toluene, xylenes, etc.)
So we don't need more petroleum. We need more fuel oil, naptha, ethylene, propylene, butadiene, benzene, toluene, xylenes, etc.

Since petroleum can be made in a lab -and was made in a lab extensively in Germany during WW2- why can't we make fuel oil, naptha, ethylene, propylene, butadiene, benzene, toluene, xylenes, etc in a lab?

Just pondering aloud here.