Why humans will probably never run out of oil

The world economy runs on oil it's been said, the engine of commerce and so on.    Of course, when it comes to oil, people speak of gasoline, gas, petrol, fuel.   Which require things such as oil, a refinery, and a number of chemical substances (some of which are quite expensive themselves) to make this petrol/gasoline/diesel.  

Assuming that the planet Earth itself is far more hardy than even the most damaging actions of billions of humans and the many billions of their non-human animals, and assuming no mass human extinction, it's still very likely that humans will never run out of oil.

Well what is oil?   Where does it come from, how is it made?   Those are the sorts of questions that may be asked.   There's certainly no shortage of questions, many of which have no answers.   But there's at least plenty-o-info on that to research in all sorts of ways.   Fossil Fuel    Petroleum

Yet there are many who believe that oil is soon to run out, being it's a   non-renewable resource.   Which indeed it is, as far as anyone knows.     One of the prominent ideas about it is expressed in the concept of  Peak Oil.   (Although to be honest, that rather reminds of  Malthusian Catastrophe predictions.)  

We've already discounted that n billion humans can easily damage the planet beyond repair with even their most ignorant actions.   Dismissed that suddenly (geologically speaking)  humanity will vanish.   Of course, neither might be the case, they could either or both happen.   Still we'll limit the scope to have a discussion, those are other topics.   Plus  for all the talk of various related things (such as an atmosphere filled with 900 or 2500 ppmv of carbon dioxide drastically changing world average temperatures by multiple degrees) no such things have happened yet and might never. Since no matter how dire the predictions by how many and in whatever way, it's impossible to experiment with in our water-based long-term climate system, and nobody can tell the future.    So short of a very long planet-wide nuclear war or asteroid strike or loss of the moon and such, both the planet and humanity seem to be safe for the next few hundred or tens of thousands of years.

In addition, we'll also ignore ideas of the sun "blowing up" or "burning out" and for now push beyond the ideas of wind, solar, nuclear, hydrogen and water alternatives.   After all, one never knows when some new method of power production will be technologically available and viable.   Such as say an existing thing like mechanized agriculture or some future thing akin to "cold-fusion" or whatever one might imagine it as.    (We are not trying to in any way suggest any of these sorts of future things are logical  sensible potential realities in and of themselves specifically, merely suggesting there are all sorts of things that might eventually be possible that are unknowns now.)

Oh, sure, the price of gasoline is out of control, it's getting more difficult to find oil, demand is way up while refinery capacity is way down, everything is so polluted, and so on.

Is it though?  

As far as gasoline prices, they're just recently at the place where the "actual cost and real cost" (consumer price indices, inflation, etc)  have come together.   That is, essentially gasoline costs just as much in a world with hundreds of millions of vehicles with internal combustion engines as it did in a world with hundreds of them.  Comparatively.    Which is to say, whatever you want to make of the data, it's easy to see for yourself what it is.   "Real" Gasoline Prices    Average Annual Gasoline Prices 1918-2012 Inflation Adjusted

The idea that oil is getting more difficult to find seems fairly nonsense given the high-profile news that often comes up.    It's like the belief that certain countries are oil-deficient because they don't have large reserves of crude.   Yet Canada, a country not typically known for its oil, has quite a bit of it.  So does South Australia it turns out.   Just not in the form of liquid currently.    And not all oil is taken directly or out of the ground.
 
Shale Oil   Oil Shale    Tight Oil

Coober Pedy    Arckaringa Basin    Mexico

Biofuel   Energy Crop   Maize  Sugarcane

( Beyond even all  that though,  there seems to be no shortage of new and large crude deposits being found now and then here and there from time to time.     2009     2012 )

That all rather ties into the money aspect we mentioned above, with a bit of other things tossed in.  Because "not running out of oil" does not mean it won't be terribly expensive and in use by fewer people in more limited ways.  

Even that's not a given though.   The fact is that while gasoline at $5 or $10 or $20 a gallon might become the standard, and might result in a quite different sort of society and economy, there appears to be plenty of oil in some form or another right now, and what comes next is something different.

We'll not get into supply and demand, because it's both complex and made further so by the new finds, political matters, non-crude sources of oil, environmentalist activists, and so on.   Neither will we go over pollution, which seems to be not quite the sloppy pervasive issue it used to be, what with all the environmental awareness these days.     Which is also to say the frequent near instant movement of data worldwide coupled with large numbers of people having a video camera with them at all times.


In the end,  even aside from the possibility they may not want or need to use oil at some point, there's no actual indication humans will be running out of oil any time soon.   Maybe never.