There is no shortage of oil; there is a shortage of easy to get at sweet light crude. There are vast reserves of sweet light crude but getting at
them requires drilling down 20,000 feet+ through granite or basalt basement rock, or going through miles of ocean, a few more miles of ocean crust
again through basement rock, to get at abiotic oil coming up from the mantel. The discovery by Wolverine in Utah is such a field, so are the two
recent discoveries in the Gulf of Mexico and off the coast of Brazil.
Going that deep, especially through saltwater, does involve some technological challenges. Salt water at depth under extreme pressure becomes
extremely corrosive to casings.
There is a world-wide shortage of drilling rigs caused by increase in demand by China and India, and the technology for deep drilling is especially
scarce.
However, we also have easy to get at deposits of heavy sour crude; we've got as much of it in Southern California as the entire country of Venezuela,
however, unlike Venezuela, we don't have the refinery capacity in the US to deal with heavy sour crude which requires additional cracking and sulfur
removal. That capacity could be built but seems that oil companies with 36 billion quarterly profits would rather continue that we tax payers fund
wars in the middle east so they can steal sweet light crude which they can process in their existing refineries.
Really, we need to get off the oil teat altogether because it can never provide the amount of energy necessary to eliminate poverty globally and it's
combustion is damaging to the environment, and plenty of alternatives DO exist today.
But the truth is we're far from running out of oil; we can go on fighting wars and ruining our environment until it collapses and most of us die of
if we choose to do so.
