This! If you look at the science on this, pretty much any combination of basic ingredients (carbon monoxide/dioxide, methane, oxygen, nitrogen, hydrogen, ammonia, etc.) and energy will produce the basic building blocks of life (amino acids or small peptides and nucleic acids). Energy can be anything, electrical discharge (the original Urey-Miller experiments), UV light (which also destroys some of the products, but forms them faster than they are destroyed), microwaves, ionizing radiation, etc.
So as the parent said, people tend to pick the energy source that's in their area of expertise and for which they can get funding.