We know that oil is formed from prehistoric plants being converted to oil under pressure in the earth’s crust. Is this process still happening, but we’re not able to access new sources due to using current resources too quickly, or is there only a finite amount and we’re going to run out entirely one day?
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It doesn’t stop, really, but the rate of new addition of organic material to the system is relatively slow. Even with the different sources we tap right now, or have in the recent past, the process of conversion was still ongoing. We just grabbed a good part of it in mid-process.
We use more petroleum in a year than the earth buries dead organic material in a year. Even if the process only took 1000 years (and it takes way longer), we would still run out. The amount of carbon we take out of the ground as fossil fuels per year is about 10 times the amount that gets buried per year.
A good portion of that buried carbon never makes it to becoming a fossil fuel too. Most of it is kept as very low concentrations, as low quality compounds, in sedimentary rocks, and will never be worthwhile recovering.
We use hundreds of times more petroleum per year than can be made by nature in that same period of time, never mind giving it time to move around and concentrate where it can be extracted.
It is sort of like taking groundwater in a region that has low rainfall. There is still water entering the ground, but the amounts are way smaller than the amount being removed, so eventually the stored water will be gone and you will have to wait for the slow replenishment and mostly do without. Except making petroleum is way slower than making groundwater, so there is no point in waiting.
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