Something I didn't learn until recently is that coal was only formed because at the time Bacteria hadn't yet evolved the ability to break down that plant matter.
On an energy basis, I'm going to doubt this claim. I know there's a common theory that having all the cheap energy of fossil fuels made modern civilization possible, but I suspect it was more of an accelerator than a requirement.
If you have fire and biomass of some sort-- wood, animal dung, etc-- you can get to steam power without too many problems. That gets you to US Civil War tech levels or so. You can build a basic global national transportation network and start mechanizing agriculture on wood-fired, steam powered equipment.
That would be able to provide the level of manufacturing to start bootstrapping electricity-- likely focusing on stationary turbines around hydropower and geothermal sources once biomass hits scaling limits. You might end up seeing an earlier focus on electric transportation systems because the energy density of coal and oil aren't available. You also get telegraphy and radio from that.
A society with electricity would also be have the footholds to start the development of modern physics and get to the splitting of the atom, and at that point, energy is supposed to become too cheap to meter.
The bigger issue I could see is the chemical opportunities hydrocarbon deposits provide.
I could imagine a society without fossil fuels plateauing at a 1870s tech level because of limitations on material technology-- higher-quality lubricants and eventually plastics being obvious missing pieces. They might be able to build an electric car, but it's going to rely on things like fabric-wrapped wires and mica insulation, and have to be lubed with tallow. This would probably only be a transient state though, because without having to compete with poking for goo in the Middle East, many of the "renewable X to oil" pipelines are economically interesting, so eventually, they do get synthetic materials and fuels, although likely at a high price that causes them to be used conservatively from day 1. Once you get to "abundant cheap energy", this likely ceases to be a huge issue.
I'd imagine that this world would end up looking a lot like ours by a hypothetical "2100 AD" tech level. They built on synthetic fuels and electricity because there was no alternative, and we'll have forcibly transitioned to them because we exhausted the fossil stopgap options.
