who owns oil?

I'm reading a book about privilege, and it made me think. Who owns oil? Nobody created it (no human, anyway), yet certain humans (oil companies) did create the conditions that made it available. Meanwhile, society created its value, though the oil companies certainly did most of the work to allow this situation to arise. So who owns it?

To answer this question, we would need to compare the wealth of society with and without oil, and see how easy it was for some competitor to find the oil, and see the effects of different prices (do we harm society by making oil less profitable?) and so on and so on. This just isn't practical. But the flip side is that, whatever argument the oil companies use to justify profits, we can create equally convincing counter-arguments. For example, an oil company might say they need vast profits from some wells, to pay the vast costs of finding them. The response to this is, if they had lower profits, we would till have oil (from easier wells) but society would benefit from lower carbon emissions, more incentive to find alternatives, less international conflict over oil, more oil left for future generations when finding it will be easier, and so on. There is no clear proof either way.

One day we might have clear answers, but until then we have to treat oil discovery like any other discovery, like an engineering design or a new drug, both of which may take vast effort to develop. In other words, use the twenty year rule. Let them make their vast profits for twenty years, then treat oil as uncreated wealth, and let land rent do the rest, creating wealth and justice for all.