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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Oil is produced over the course of tens of millions of years. The process is still happening, but it is so slow compared to the duration of our lives that we can consider the total amount of oil on the planet to be constant.
This doesn’t mean we have discovered all the oil deposits though : finding oil requires complex analyses of the ground, sometimes underwater, and we haven’t done that everywhere.
We aren’t going to wake up one day and find that there’s no more oil. The process will be longer and has already begun. The more oil is extracted, the more difficult the next deposits are to find and to exploit : they are deeper, in more remote places, sometimes underwater, of lesser quality… In the XIXth century, people sometimes just dug in their garden and found oil. Today we need to dig several kilometers. Since there is less and less oil, and less and less exploitable oil, the production must reach a peak, and then decline. This is called “peak oil”.
Peak oil has been reached in 2006. However, we started extracting a new kind of oil : shale oil, more polluting and more difficult to extract, but still profitable now that conventional oil is becoming scarce. Shale oil has pushed back peak oil to around 2030. From around 2030, oil production will start to decrease (assuming the decrease of oil production is not organized before, to address climate change… but I have little hope)
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