Carbon-14 dating of crude oil

["Karam, Andrew" <Andrew_Karam@URMC.Rochester.edu>]

I would be skeptical of such a date.  C-14 is, of course, only accurate to
about 50 K or so years, which covers the date range you mention.  However,
crude oil takes tens or hundreds of millions of years to form.  Most
deposits of which I am aware are hundreds of millions to a few billion years
old.  If someone dated crude oil at 26 K years then I would guess that their
measurements are off, that they are trying to show that we don't really
understand how crude oil forms, or that the oil somehow became exposed to
"live" C-14 after it formed but before it was extracted.

Speaking to the second possibility, I would suggest that, even if we don't
understand exactly how crude oil forms, it is found under pressure in strata
that are of great age.  It is implausible to assume it formed relatively
recently and subsequently migrated to great depth against a pressure
gradient.  

Sincerely,

Andy

Andrew_Karam@URMC.Rochester.edu

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