Cheap , fairly-easy, portable, storable source of energy, and the current supply chains are very high capacity.
Lots of well understood methods and machines to use it. An oil tanker on sea or land moves a hell of a lot of energy to wherever people want it.

Population keeps growing. No way are all of those people going to leave that stuff in the ground, if "we" don't take the cheap stuff, "they" will. So it becomes like a race to find and extract it all.

Even if you don't want it personally, someone in your economy or military will be better off for it. Some people will go looking for it - and someone'll get rich if they find it.