http://www.ukooa.co.uk/issues/storyofoi ... cal-01.htm
This tells the conventional oil and gas story fairly succinctly.
Gold was an astronomer who got into geoscience largely through exogeology.
If his argument holds, why do exploration O&G professionals drill thousands of mile of core, looking for specific fossils and bacterial signatures in order to successfully find oil? Why is 99.99+% of all energy-bearing strata sedimentary (not igneous or metamorphic)? How come there is a close correlation between prehistoric 'swampy' environments and modern energy-bearing deposits? Science is ultimately pragmatic, if nothing else.
If Gold had restricted himself to abiotic methane, trapped, presumably from the initial planetary nebula (a concept itself under fire, as some now believe planets accreted at relatively low temperatures) he might have been taken somewhat seriously. As others have indicated, he basically stole his concept from the Russian Mendeleev --the fellow who assembled the periodic table of the elements, but who who also had a number or other, very strange ideas.
Sean, read Gold, by all means, but do some investigation of oil and gas geology from conventional sources too. Arguments by analogy such as 'in 1960 no one believed in plate tectonics and everyone believed it in 1965' are also untrue. The earth's crust conceived as discrete movable plates started about the time the first good maps were made, won a convert in Alfred Wegener about 1915 (based on biology and fossils) puttered through to the 1940s when Hess and Vine worked on oceanfloor soundings and found a mechanism, didn't 'make the textbooks' as virtual fact until after 1978 (when I took geology) and is under revision by geoscientists and attack by all sorts of geo-kooks to this very day.
The devils of science are in the details. So you gotta dig for the details.
By the way--there isn't anything such as brown coal or black coal. Coal is a continuum from peat to lignite to bituminous to anthracite. The divisions are entirely artificial, based on assay of BTU output of the substance. It is true most anthracite is formed under metamorphic conditions, but bituminous and anthracite can be found contiguously as well.