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

There’s oil deposits everywhere, but within complex geography’s and amounts that make it uneconomical to drill.

Lookup the Monterey Shale formation in California. It’s one of the biggest deposits in the world, but unattainable due to the viscosity and tight formation. Basically it’s too deep for rod lift due to viscosity and pressure losses and can’t be fracked successfully as the propant can’t go far enough into the formation for enough flow.

Couple that with a-hole regulations making it harder to permit or more expensive and you decrease investment in exploration and production.