The world is a big place, and searching for oil and gas in it can be like trying to find a needle in a haystack. The possibilities can be significantly narrowed however, if you know where to look. And to know where to look, you need to know where oil and gas come from, which brings me to bacon. Cooking bacon produces oil and gas, both of which are brimming with hydrocarbons or molecular chains of hydrogen and carbon atoms. These oil and gases are released from protein and fat cells in the bacon that break down under heat from the stove. Cooking bacon is a greatly speeded up analogy for how oil and gas form in nature. Rather than bacon, the primary source of the oil and gas is microscopic marine organisms, also known as plankton. Plankton are the most abundant form of life in the oceans, and the base of the marine food chain. The kitchen for oil and gas is the offshore, where sediments eroded from the land accumulate. However, oil and gas formation will only begin when the marine life in this region is so abundant that a significant fraction dies uneaten and accumulates on the seabed along with sediments coming off the land. I have here a rock that is chock-full of fossils, embedded in a fine clay matrix sediment that was eroded off of some ancient land mass. It is this type of layer from which oil and gas first forms. As this layer, over time, is buried under more and more sediments, pressures and temperatures can rise to the point that they break down the organic matter, cooking it, and releasing the oil and gas it contains. For this oil and gas to ultimately be economic to extract, it must be trapped in the subsurface and accumulate in large volumes. Determining whether a region meets all the conditions required for an economic accumulation of oil and gas demands a lot of information. We do know where to start to look for oil and gas though, and that is in the offshore environment with prolific marine life and high sedimentation rates. In modern ocean basins, this is often major rivers. On land, it's regions with rocks like this that indicate that at some point in the past, the environment was conducive to forming oil and gas.