Originally Posted by MathewHennessy

There's no such thing as running out. What will happen is:

• cheaply-recoverable oil will no longer be cheap to recover
• the price of oil will rise to reflect this
• the price of oil will rise to the point where synthetic oil is cheaper than 'traditional' oil
• synthetic oil will replace 'traditional' oil.

The North American continent contains enough coal and shale to produce synthetic oil sufficient for several centuries of forseeable use.

Note I say nothing about the environmental impact of such a scenario. Nor do I say anything about the intervening years where we send money to countries that we should be detonating hydrogen bombs over. But the idea that we're in danger of running out of oil is a fallacy. We're running out of cheap oil, and that happened to western europe years ago (due to gas taxes removing the 'cheap').