With political analysts warning the sky is falling when it comes to shrinking oil reserves, Yahoo running front pages stories about rising oil prices due to shrinking reserves and a certain former vice president winning an Oscar for a documentary warning of the end of the world, it's hard not to feel like at any moment the world's going to run out of juice. But we haven't run out yet, not by a long shot. We're just running out of the easy-to-get-stuff. What is the easy-to-get oil? That's oil that can be gathered with relatively little oilfield production costs and technology in democratically stable countries. Which means two things. One, there's still oil in stable countries, it's just getting harder to get to and requires new technological innovations. Two, there's still oil that's relatively easy to produce, it just happens to exist in countries that are not in friendly relations with oil-consuming countries. But there's good news in both cases. The first is that technology is always moving forward. 25 years ago people thought George Mitchell was insane to be drilling in the Barnett shale. Now the innovations he created are helping to produce fossil fuels worldwide. Nobody knew how to get oil out of oil sands, but somebody figured it out. Where there's a will, there's a way. The other piece of good news is that despotic governments can become more open governments when the citizens get tired of their leaders running their countries into the ground. I'd say with the way some of these guys are running their countries, we'll see a lot more U.S.-friendly oil producers in the next decade. –Stephen Payne, Editor, Oil and Gas Investor This Week; spayne@hartenergy.com
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