james said:
As you say, the easily-accessible oil has mostly been sucked up. To me that says "running out". In other words, not everyone that wants oil is going to be able to get it at a price they're willing to pay.
i agree with fklentz's logic., or at least i can understand how he could be right if the variables fall in to place. ( lots of variables, and i don't know their values )
we can all agree that gasoline comes to us by virtue of a process in which crude oil is refined into different constituents (is that the right word?.. anyway). for any barrel of crude, only some percent of that barrel can potentially end up as gasoline. on the Earth, there is only a certain quantity of instances of operations whereat crude oil is "claimed" from the planet.
there really only seems to be a few points of consideration here ( extracting crude, delivering to refining, refining into gasoline, delivering gasoline for sale ), but each one of the steps in the supply line from Earth->GasPump is not flat. there are multiple paths connecting one point to each other, one point may share several different neighbors on both sides.
without thinking myself into circles too quickly, imagine that the amount of gasoline consumed per day is traced back a certain quantity of crude oil per day. if the amount of crude oil in the ground exceeds the rate of consumption, "X", after having considered the "natural" growth in consumption as time increases, but the rate at which crude oil can be extracted/refined/delivered to satisfy that consumption is less than X, fklentz's argument that the demand exceeds the supply but that the amount of crude oil in the ground is not the problem, can be shown to be valid.
it seems to depend on what you define "supply" as. are you defining it as the amount of gasoline coming out of the refinery or are you defining it as the volume of crude oil contained within the Earth.
naturally, if the volume of crude oil contained within the Earth is a limiting factor, the rates don't mean a damn, as we will "run out". but if there is no shortage of crude "in the ground down there", but we can't get it out enough to keep the refineries busy enough, then the issue is the rate of consumption of gasoline exceeds the rate of the entire refining process, and not the amount of dead dinosaur goop we build shopping malls on top of.