Yes, they found 'traces' of oil in a deep hole in the craton. Now let's examine that in the context of what an craton it. It is the central, original, continental silicate rock that originally differatiated from the more basic rock that makes up most of the Earth's crust. The cratons have been there a long time, billions of years, and have undergone many rounds of the Wilsonian Cycle of the aggregation and breakup of the continents. So they have many, many fault systems, old and young, in them.
Now, if the Gold Hypothesis were real, wouldn't at least some of these faults be filled with oil? But they are not. And we find oil associated with ocean basin deposits. So much so that they use fossils recovered when drilling to tell them if they are in the right kind of formations.
USING MICROFOSSILS IN PETROLEUM EXPLORATION
WHEN I meet new people and they find out that I'm a paleontologist working for an oil company, the second question they ask (after "What is a paleontologist?") is usually "Why would an oil company hire one?" Most people think of dinosaurs when they think of paleontology, or at the very least trilobites and other invertebrate fossils. However, most of the rock samples available to those engaged in finding and developing hydrocarbon resources are in the form of "cuttings." Cuttings (Baker, 1979) are the small pieces of rock broken up by the drill bit and brought to the surface by the fluid which lubricates the drill bit and removes the cut rock from the bottom of the drill hole. If the bit encounters dinosaur bones or clam shells, they are so broken up in the process as to be almost unusable. Microfossils on the other hand, by virtue of their small size, can be recovered whole. Microfossils also happen to be abundant, especially in marine rocks which are the most common form of sedimentary rock in the crust of the Earth.
Microfossils have many applications to petroleum geology (Fleisher and Lane, in press, Ventress, 1991, LeRoy, 1977). The two most common uses are: biostratigraphy and paleoenvironmental analyses. Biostratigraphy is the differentiation of rock units based upon the fossils which they contain. Paleoenvironmental analysis is the interpretation of the depositional environment in which the rock unit formed, based upon the fossils found within the unit. There are many other uses of fossils besides these, including: paleoclimatology, biogeography, and thermal maturation.
Of course, this is just a real geologist speaking, not an internet possier.
