Young-earth "proof" #18: The incredible pressure found in oil and gas wells indicates they have been there less than 15,000 years. (Presumably, the oil or gas would have escaped long before then.)

18. The incredible pressure found in oil and gas wells indicates that the oil and gas have been effectively trapped. The initial slow accumulation of oil and gas, the result of primary migration, would hardly have a chance to build up great pressures if the trapping rock layers were full of cracks and acting like a sieve!

Oil and gas also do a lot of migrating, and the oil accumulated in a given reservoir may have undergone a secondary migration from another reservoir. Thus, a given pool of oil may or may not have been there millions and millions of years. A recent geological shift in the rocks might also increase the leakage of an oil pool. Thus, the mere existence of a leaky oil pool is not, in itself, sufficient proof that the oil had to be recently created.

The primary migration of oil from 1 to 5 kilometers deep in the earth, where it is produced under a combination of pressure and heat acting on organic matter, probably goes hand in hand with water migration. The water is squeezed out as the sediments experience more and more pressure. Thus, it may interest you to know how fast water migrates down there.

Some idea of the extremely slow speed of fluid motion to be expected can be gained by considering the movement of ground water at shallow depths in dense clays, classed as "impermeable." Under a moderate hydraulic gradient and a reasonable value of permeability for clay, we come up with flow speeds of ground water on the order of 2 to 3 million years per kilometer [3.2 to 4.8 million years per mile]. Yet the permeability of source shales of petroleum is rated at only one-thousandth as great as for clays tested in the surface environment (Wszolek and Burlingame, 1987, p. 573). (Strahler, 1987, p.237)

Thus, the primary migration of oil from its place of origin will take far longer than the mere 6000 years or so creationists allow for the age of the earth. Creationists have tried to dance around that figure by quoting special cases of secondary migration or by simple smoke screen tactics, but the problem remains (Strahler, 1987, pp.237-238).