It wasn't just Gold.
Fred Hoyle bought into abiotic oil too, and opined that the white clouds of Venus were a miles-thick mist of oil droplets shrouding a surface covered by an ocean of petroleum. Ironically, it was in his book "Frontiers of Astronomy" which I read in middle school where he also carried out a spirited defense of the Steady-State theory, another total loss. Neither of those claims stood up to the data. OTOH, that book was his popular exposition of nucleogenesis, and his theories of stellar evolution, ideas that eventually were thoroughly vindicated.