A massive drilling project in Russia is attempting to prove a contentious Soviet-era hypothesis: that oil can form in Earth’s depths without any organic matter.
This month, geologists at Saint Petersburg Mining University will start to drill boreholes up to 8 kilometers deep in the Russian Arctic Komi region, university leadership and local government announced on 4 June. The initiative, located not far from the record-breaking Kola Superdeep Borehole drilled by the Soviet Union, is supposed to trial novel drilling technology and equipment built in Russia. But it will also seek evidence that major oil deposits can be created by geological processes alone—proving oil is therefore a renewable, “endless” resource.
The theory—not supported by scientific evidence—would be “a globalist’s worst nightmare” if proved, according to a 2025 op-ed for the state media outlet RIA Novosti written by Vladimir Litvinenko, the university’s rector and a close associate of Russian President Vladimir Putin. The university did not respond to multiple requests for comment from Science.
The idea that oil has an abiogenic origin was popularized by the 19th century Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleev, who also developed the periodic law for grouping chemical elements. He theorized that primordial hydrocarbons seeping from Earth’s mantle can ultimately form petroleum deposits. Soviet geologists, urged by the government after World War II to find new domestic oil reserves, seized on the idea. They searched for evidence in the Kola borehole, which reached its maximum depth of 12.2 kilometers less than 2 years before the USSR collapsed in 1991. In the West, the abiogenic oil hypothesis was promoted by Thomas Gold, a Cornell University astrophysicist, who championed a deep drilling project in Sweden.
But multiple attempts to verify the theory by drilling have failed to identify any commercially interesting deposits that lacked a plausible biological origin, notes a 2010 paper in Marine and Petroleum Geology. Although inorganic reactions in natural environments on Earth or in space can form some hydrocarbons, notably methane, all significant oil deposits appear to have formed from organic material. “The molecular architecture of petroleum reflects its biological origin—dramatically so,” says Mark Sephton, professor of organic geochemistry at Imperial College London, whose group studies generating simple hydrocarbons in a lab.
Yet the idea has persisted in Russia, one of the world’s largest oil producers. In his 2025 op-ed, Litvinenko wrote that the theory was unfairly discarded by Western experts by the end of the last century, comparing this “groundless” sidelining to the persecution of genetics and geneticists in the early Soviet Union.
Now, his university is attempting to make its case in the new drilling project. Details of the project—including what evidence of abiogenic oil researchers hope to find—are scarce. But in his address to a research conference at the university in 2023, Litvinenko pointed to another superdeep drilling project by Sinopec, the Chinese state petrochemical giant, which ostensibly revealed oil seeping up from deep underground and refilling traditional deposits. (A paper on the “scientific significance” of that project, published in 2025 in Petroleum Exploration and Development, does not address abiogenic oil formation.)
Daniel Spiro, an economist at Uppsala University who studies the intersection of conflict, energy, and environmental problems, says he can see why Russia would want to project a future of “endless oil.” The country is resisting the global transition away from fossil fuels while also downplaying the reality and risks of climate change, he says. On paper, the Russian government accepts the United Nations’s climate reports as well as its own national assessments outlining the risks of warming for Russia. Yet, like Putin himself, Litvinenko has repeatedly questioned the role of fossil fuels in climate change and the need for a move to renewable energy. The prospect of endless oil may also alleviate worries in Komi, one of the key oil-producing regions in the country, where supply is dwindling.
The funding for the project has also raised eyebrows. The project sites were licensed for drilling in late 2024 to a relatively new and unknown LLC co-founded by one of Litvinenko’s advisers, according to public disclosure information. The LLC reportedly won state auctions with no competition and paid more than 500 million rubles ($6.9 million) for access.
“There are clearly overlapping interests here” of those who would like to delay the energy transition to keep making money from oil and those who can “sciencewash” that sentiment into a glossy research project, says Alexandra Prokopenko, a fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center who recently published a book about modern Russian elites. Litvinenko, who ran Putin’s presidential campaigns in St. Petersburg four times and reportedly advised him on his Ph.D. thesis in economics, is consistently named among the richest university administrators in the country.
Prokopenko notes, however, that at a time when the Ukraine war is undermining the Russian economy, these projects appear “outrageously wasteful,” adding that “this seems like really bad timing.” At least some people in Komi, where the drilling will happen, agree. On the Russian social network VK, the most popular comment under the governor’s press office post about this new “ambitious project” calls on the authorities to “finish old ambitious projects first.”