TaaL: One of the entertaining things about human societies is the economic bubbles they blow. Tulips, internet stocks, real estate derivatives... it happens over and over again. It starts with the belief that there’s some new investment which can only go up in value. Investors pour in, their initial success causes more to pour in, and so on, until the initial assumption is proven wrong, and a bunch of money is lost. That explains not only the growth of fracking, but why the narrative was so shiny: it was about recruiting money investments. Yet as of this writing (in USA, early 2020), oil is being sold for less than it costs to extract. Odds are, fracking activity will repeatedly stop and start as the money price of oil yo-yos back and forth in coming decades, bouncing off the floor of “too cheap to be worth extracting” and the ceiling of “too expensive to afford.” I’d guess that if your nation USA holds together long enough, domestic oil sources will eventually be nationalized and used for farming and defense, since the total amount of oil available will be a lot lower than it is today.
The Bottom Line: The world isn’t running out of oil, but human societies are running out of affordable oil.
A Crude Substitute
Summary : These days, a lot of what’s now being called “crude oil” isn’t
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