The coming century will overflow with petroleum.

It offends conventional wisdom. It will also seem nasty to the doom-sayers, who for decades have predicted an oil scarcity that never came. But the 21st century is very likely to overflow with oil. There are at least three main reasons for this.

First, oil reserves are finite. This is incontrovertible. But even so, no one knows how finite they are. And since we don't know the total amount of oil resources existing underground, it's impossible to calculate the curve of future supply.

... Second, new technologies allow us to extract much more oil than initially assumed. Today, we recover on average less than 35% of the oil contained in known fields, up from 20% in 1980. Even the most mature oil country, the United States, still holds huge volumes of unexploited oil underground. Although the country's proven oil reserves are now only 29 billion barrels, the National Petroleum Council (NPC) estimates that 1.124 trillion barrels are still left underground, of which 374 billion would be recoverable with current technologies.

... Third, only one third of our planet has been sufficiently explored for discovery of new oil deposits. Once again, this is because it was not economical or technically feasible to undertake big and sophisticated exploration campaigns when oil was abundant and cheap, as it was for most of the past century.