Well, to be fair, nobody ever said we'd be humming along like usual, with $1.25/gal gas, then suddenly all the pumps would permanently run dry.
They're not finding "new methodologies" to access those previously untapped stockpiles. They always knew how to tap them. The problem was that with oil at $30/barrel, it wasn't economical. But with oil at $100/barrel, suddenly it becomes profitable to employ those expensive techniques.
The reality is, we have run out of "easily accessible" oil. We've now resorted to harvesting the more difficult oil, deep beneath the ocean in the Arctic, and buried in sand in Canada. Oil that we always knew was there, but didn't make sense to chase when we could simply push a straw into the dirt anywhere in Texas and come up with hundreds of thousands of barrels of the stuff.
The "running out of oil" is already happening. That's why oil is no longer $30/barrel. In a few more years, $100/barrel will look wistfully nostalgic. At some point in the future, it will pass $200/barrel, and we'll be going after even more risky stores of the stuff. But make no mistake, it's happening. Deepwater Horizon created a huge mess and perfectly illustrates the risk of chasing after ever more inaccessible caches of oil to quench our thirst. Eventually, we'll be unable to resist carving up our sacred cows, and we'll drill in national parks. It's inevitable.
But like I said, it's not going to be some sort of "binary switch" where everything is going along as normal, then suddenly we run out. It's a gradual progression, and the signs are already visible, from the increasingly risky drilling locations, to the escalating price and the proliferation of hybrid vehicles. THIS is what running out of oil looks like - not some dramatic cutoff.
