I have spent twenty-five years in the study of petroleum and have come to the conclusion that it is a product of the earth's interior, formed at great depths.
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"The greatest good is the knowledge of the truth."
"My table will serve as an instrument for discovering new facts and for correcting old ones."
"I believe in the power of observation and experiment above all else."
"When we see the order of the elements, we must admit that there is a higher reason."
"To conceive, understand, and grasp the whole symmetry of the scientific edifice, including its unfinished portions, is equivalent to tasting that enjoyment only conveyed by the highest forms of beauty…"
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After a quarter century studying petroleum, the speaker concludes oil is not the squeezed remains of ancient plants and animals but something generated deep inside the Earth itself. In other words, he argues oil forms from inorganic processes at great depth, then migrates upward into the reservoirs we drill. It is a firm rejection of the biological origin story in favor of a geological, planetary one.
Mendeleev was not only the chemist who organized the periodic table but also a tireless industrial consultant who toured the oilfields of Baku and Pennsylvania. His chemistry-first instinct pushed him to propose the abiogenic theory of petroleum: hydrocarbons forming when water reacts with metal carbides deep underground. The quote captures his characteristic pattern, patient empirical study followed by a sweeping theoretical claim that cut against prevailing opinion.
In the late 1800s, kerosene lamps lit the world and Russia's Baku fields rivaled Pennsylvania's as petroleum became a strategic commodity. Geologists largely backed the organic theory, yet the planet's interior was still speculative territory. Mendeleev's government advisory work on tariffs, refining, and pipelines gave him access to raw field data, and his abiogenic argument fit a broader Russian scientific tradition that treated Earth's deep chemistry as an active, generative system.
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