For what it is worth, I spent several years embedded with Chevron in refining. I can tell you for a fact that if Tim Clarey was doing exploration for that company, he was working under supervision and following conventional guidance. If he ever showed up to the conference table without work done to best practices and rational based on accepted geology, he would not have been employed long. Hundreds of millions of dollars are at stake and dry wells lead to dry bank accounts. Finding oil requires an understanding and acceptance of the age of formation, rock porosity and migration, temperature and pressure history over geological time, folding, and capping. Evolutionary dating of microfossils and degree of cooking is employed in the search where available. I know geologists, including Christian geologists, in the industry and none are YEC.
Petroleum basin and petroleum system modeling is detailed and encompasses millions of years. This is what oil companies expect, emphasis mine:
(BPSM) tracks the evolution of a basin through time as it fills with fluids and sediments that may eventually generate or contain hydrocarbons … On the other hand, BPSM simulates the hydrocarbon-generation process to calculate the charge, or the volume of hydrocarbons available for entrapment, as well as the fluid flow, to predict the volumes and locations of accumulations and their properties. The distance scale typically is tens to hundreds of kilometers, and the periods covered may reach hundreds of millions of years.
You may want to go through the postings of the late Glen Morton @gbob on this forum. Glen was a Christian who started out YEC and spent an entire career in oil exploration. His take:
When I left YEC in disgust in the in 1987, the biggest part of my disgust concerned the utter lack of interest in geologic data. I could put data in front of them, show them pictures, explain what the pictures meant, and the data was still ignored, treated as if it didn’t exist.
You can read his story here.