And if we read from a different book, I can then get facts that agree much more with my idea of what is credible.
From the link posted above
Now, it's not as if high prices haven't sent people looking for more oil and working on more substitutes. The problem is that all of this activity is facing a considerable headwind. It's called depletion. And, as they say in the oil patch, depletion never sleeps. It's going on in every operating well in every country around the clock, 365 days a year. Estimates suggest that the decline in current production capacity might be around 4 percent per year. That means that 4 percent of the current production capacity for oil must be replaced each year just to break even. And, of course, to grow supplies, new production capacity must exceed this amount. But it hasn't, and oil substitutes haven't really grown by any significant amount in the last six years either.
The media loves to announce new seemingly large discoveries of oil as if they are the solution to what is really an unfolding liquid fuels crisis. They point to the Tupi field off Brazil which is purported to have 8 billion barrels of oil in it. And, they point to discoveries in the deepwater Gulf of Mexico thought to contain between 3 and 15 billion barrels. And, they point to the 4 billion barrels in the Bakken Shale in North Dakota. It all sounds like a lot. When I ask audiences how long a billion barrels of oil will last the world at current rates of consumption, I often get replies that range anywhere from three months to 5 years. The correct answer is 12 days. Just multiply these multi-billion-barrel discoveries by 12, and you'll realize right away that they are not going to overcome the constraints we are experiencing in oil supplies
Getting a bit of thread drift here,but, at late 90's consumption figures, approx 67 million barrels per day for 365 days 24,455,000,000 barrels multiply that by even 1,000 years and that is an awful lot of oil somewhere that are supposedly known/proven? reserves??