Wait a minute. Ever since I became aware that something called crude oil exists—and even long before that—we were all instructed in a single, solemn truth: oil is finite, the end is near, and maximum production would arrive any minute now. In fact, according to confident experts of the past, we should have sailed past peak oil more than thirty years ago. And yet—here we are. Production keeps growing. Reserves keep expanding. And the world appears to be sitting atop an almost inexhaustible supply.
Not truly inexhaustible, no. I’m not that naïve. But the real reserves of oil and gas are vastly larger than most people are willing—or able—to imagine. What has actually peaked is not oil itself, but easy oil. The friendly kind. The oil that is easy to find, easy to drill, easy to lift, easy to refine, and easy to sell without giving anyone a headache. That era is largely behind us.
But easy oil was never more than a shallow puddle in a much larger lake. The world is awash in uneasy oil. The kind buried under geologies that look like practical jokes. The kind that resists drills, mocks seismic surveys, clings stubbornly to rock, flows like cold molasses, or comes generously laced with contaminants engineers would rather not meet. Oil in the wrong place, of the wrong quality, at the wrong pressure, under the wrong politics. There is plenty of it.
Take Venezuela. Its oil is notoriously heavy, stubborn, and expensive to handle. Large portions of it may never be produced for purely practical reasons. And yet it still bloats the country’s reserves on paper, contributing faithfully to the global illusion of abundance. Turning that oil into something useful requires time, faith, technology, political sanity—and a very large pile of money. Preferably upfront.So no, we are not “running out” of oil in the way the bedtime stories promised. We are merely running out of oil that behaves nicely. Everything else is still there, waiting patiently, daring us to decide how badly we actually want it.
https://www.masterresource.org/venezuela-energy-policy/venezuela-oil-under-statism/