Reply #17: No one really knows...

[TreasonousBastard]

because there are unexplored areas, such as the Florida Gulf coast, that haven't been touched. Add up the provable reserves, if you can find the honest numbers, and do some math with expected annual use, and you get the time when we run out. Or, get to the point where it is too expensive to burn, and will be used primarily as a raw material for chemical and plastic production.

There is also a crackpot theory gaining ground that oil is not from long dead dinosaurs, but is being produced as we speak by geological processes. I'm not going to look it up, but I remember some discussion elsewhere a while back where this Swede (I think) actually found oil in a mountain. Created, he says, by the mountain moving and squooshing around the carbon in there. That it took him months to get one lousy barrel did not seem important to him at the time.

At any rate, whether or not there will be an oil crisis in our lifetimes, and there likely will be, there are massive environmental and economic benefits to reducing oil consumption.