Yes. Slime, plant like material and swamp bugs that get stuck in sedimentary sands and shale. Extraction method techniques and technology have made jumps in the past 30 years. Especially fracking with propant engineered sand and new proprietary solvents and solutions, huge tar sands and reservoirs are now economically feasible for extraction and have more than doubled or tripled our strategic reserves for hydrocarbons.
Also, since I’m on a rant. Do not fall for the Hydrogen as an energy source. Well, it is, but only in carbon chains that make it molecularly bigger as Hydrogen is so small it’s near impossible to keep from leaking in current infrastructure. Also, the energy density isn’t high enough at reasonable temperatures/pressures. Plus pure hydrogen cracked from water isn’t actually energy, it’s a battery because it takes more energy to crack than you get in return because of the two oxygen atoms.
What would be REALLY cool is if we found a stable form of hydrogen naturally occurring with a larger atomic structure so it could be stored and transported in higher energy densities than gaseous Hydrogen. Maybe a semi stable liquid/gas with really high energy density levels that was made by solar energy from millions of years ago? Maybe just waiting for us to pump it out of the ground responsibly?
Oh yeah.
That’s oil and gas now. Hydrogen made stable by carbon chains.
We burn the natural occurring hydrogen that the sun made for us already. The smoke is just the carbon that held it stable for us.
Oil and gas is solar power saved from millions of years ago.