Oil and gas folks please explain the whole oil /gas scarcity thing to me

Well you see Timmy, there's plenty of oil and gas, but it's places that are inaccessible or cost prohibitive.

I ain't worried about it. After Monday everything I own is gonna be eclipse powered.

Scarcity in the economic sense is that there’s only so much oil for sale. As one person mentioned, oil is a lot of places that are currently costly to get to.

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Really

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yeah, really. You seeing a scarcity?

The stuff that rots and dies has to be in sufficient accumulations, at a sufficient depth and temperature to cook into oil and gas and trapped in a geologic formation such that it is recoverable. Typically this occurs where shallow oceans used to exist - all the organisms in the shallow water die and accumulate in sandstones, which over geologic time (hundreds of millions of years) become oil and gas reservoirs. I guess once we deplete what is recoverable today we can wait another 300 million years for the processes to repeat.

I agree we are unlikely to run out. At high enough oil prices we will continue to develop more and more marginal reservoirs.

Artificial scarcity by the Saudis and OPEC + cutting production, and refineries changing from winter to summer blend gasoline this time of year creates a temporary supply gap.

All the easily accessible oil has been discovered and mostly produced. Plenty of recoverable reserves exist, Venezuelan Orinoco River delta heavy crude, deep water Brazil, Canadian tar sands and Alaskan ANWR just a few examples that can be easily though not cheaply produced.

Move to nuclear energy to power the grid, develop low cost hydrogen fuel cells for autos and there’s plenty of oil till the end of this century for plastics and other petroleum based products.

I can’t speak for the oil business, but there is no shortage of natural gas . In the US we have so much, that we are exporting it to Europe and the Middle East.

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Oil is a renewable resource.

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It’s not renewable in a timeframe that would be useful, so it is considered non-renewable, and rightly so. It is not renewing at the rate we are using it.

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As one person mentioned, oil is a lot of places that are currently costly to get to.

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It’s a lot of places that are easily gotten to as well. If oil companies were not afraid that the US government was going to persecute them every time Democrats come to power, or that PEC would glut the market if the US share got too large, they could double US production in BOE/D.