The Significance of Oil Chemistry
It is very significant that porphyrin molecules break apart rapidly in the presence of oxygen and heat.5 Therefore, the fact that porphyrins are still present in crude oils today must mean that the petroleum source rocks and the plant (and animal) fossils in them had to have been kept from the presence of oxygen when they were deposited and buried. There are two ways this could have been achieved:
1. The sedimentary rocks were deposited under oxygen deficient (or reducing) conditions.6
2. The sedimentary rocks were deposited so rapidly that no oxygen could destroy the porphyrins in the plant and animal fossils.7
However, even where sedimentation is relatively rapid by today’s standards, such as in river deltas in coastal zones, conditions are still oxidizing.8 Thus, to preserve organic matter containing porphyrins requires its slower degradation in the absence of oxygen, such as in the Black Sea today.9 But such environments are too rare to explain the presence of porphyrins in all the many petroleum deposits found around the world. The only consistent explanation is the catastrophic sedimentation that occurred during the worldwide Genesis Flood. Tons of vegetation and animals were violently uprooted and killed respectively, so that huge amounts of organic matter were buried so rapidly that the porphyrins in it were removed from the oxidizing agents which could have destroyed them.
The amounts of porphyrins found in crude oils vary from traces to 0.04% (or 400 parts per million).10 Experiments have produced a concentration of 0.5% porphyrin (of the type found in crude oils) from plant material in just one day,11 so it doesn’t take millions of years to produce the small amounts of porphyrins found in crude oils. Indeed, a crude oil porphyrin can be made from plant chlorophyll in less than 12 hours. However, other experiments have shown that plant porphyrin breaks down in as little as three days when exposed to temperatures of only 410°F (210°C) for only 12 hours. Therefore, the petroleum source rocks and the crude oils generated from them can’t have been deeply buried to such temperatures for millions of years.