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Q&A

How to explain lack of fosil fuels on an Earth-like exoplanet?

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Planet - habitable, tidally locked planet orbitting red dwarf.

Aim: a realistic answer (neither involving handwavium nor aliens that used it all) why a virgin planet that already experienced a while ago its great oxygenation event, has practically no easily accessible (by standards of early XXIst century technology) fossil fuels sources. I mean especially oil and natural gas, however lack of coal would also be beneficial.

Thus the questions:

1) How to explain that?

2) What fossil fuel sources would still be accessible anyway?

My tries:

1a) Maybe continental drift that moved continent with fossil fuels sources in the coldest regions under a few km of ice, and moved those that were covered with ice to the light side of the planet)

1b) Really deep ocean - makes any drilling extra hard

2) Presumably some bog would be unavoidable. I have no idea about gas and oil. To be safe I thought about putting them in tiny quantities that do not justify drilling.

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This post was sourced from https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/54845. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

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