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Sigma, you must be crazy man. We find new oil everyday. Especially underneath the ocean. There are vast amounts of oil under the ocean we haven't even found yet.



Experts aren't saying we have used at least half of what we have found -- they're saying we've used half of what there is. This comes from every Oil Company out there, OPEC nations, even our own Energy Secretary.

It's too bad that every government agency, both domestic and international (including OPEC themselves) and every oil company disagrees with you.

I never said that we don't find more oil everyday. We know there is more oil out there. Problem is we don't find more at a pace that even comes to close to matching our usage increase every year.

And, you're correct, there is Oil under the Ocean. Oil that will cost MANY MANY times more to retrieve than the surface-drilled oil. Have you seen the size of of the oil rigs being built now? Billions of dollars just to hit a few pockets of oil. Oil rig construction peaked years ago. The rigs now need to be far too large to go deep enough and don't get a good return.

We will have to drill that oil at some point -- but you'll be paying $20/gallon for it.

If there's so much oil than why for the last 3 months has every Oil and Natural Gas producer been revising their reserve estimates by HUGE amounts.

Oil reserve estimates have been "revised" by 30% in the last 3 months. Natural Gas reserve estimates have been "revised" by 41%.

These aren't government or scientific projections; these are from the owners of the fields themselves to their stockholders as their fields that they thought were huge, were beginning to scrape the bottom of the barrel.

Whoopsie?

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We'll be using oil for at least another 150 years, and I'm sure they'll have another energy source by then anyways.



Putting your fingers in your ears and going "La-la-la-la-la" doesn't make the problem go away. We haven't found a replacement for oil in 150 years, what makes you think we're going to find one in the nextg 150 years?

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Not to mention the fact that we use other country's oil in order to save ours.



Our oil production peaked in the early '70's. We're not "saving" ours, we don't have any because we already used most of it. We've got thousands of scientists scouring the US for more oil fields with no luck.

Every oil field in the domestic US has been tapped for a very long time. We're to the point now that we have to pump chemicals into the Earth to dilute to oil to make it cheap enough to retrieve it, then remove those chemicals afterwards.

This all makes the oil VERY expensive.

Running out of the Oil isn't the big problem. It is a big problem, but not the first one that we're going to come across.

The problem is what's going to happen to our economy when the price of a barrel of oil is several times what it is now.

It's easy to argue how much oil is out there. You can't see it, so anyone can say there's as much as they want to say. I'll grant you that.

You can't argue that Oil Production peaked 4 years ago, that's a fact, while the expenses to retrieve the declining amount of oil have increased (so you can't say that production decreased to increase price, because expenses would decrease at the same rate) -- meaning it costs considerably more to pump a barrel of oil now than it did just 4 years ago.

We've found more fields, built more rigs/pumps/etc, yet production is still declining every year. It's only a matter of time before the decline in supply meets the absolute minimum demand, which is increasing while supply is decreasing.

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