I have a book in my office: "When the oil runs out", from 1947. It hasn't.
Middle eastern oil was cheap and plentiful, so we used it. You pick the low hanging fruit first.
This isn't the first time we've had the whole 'peak oil' thingy pushed at us. Most of the restrictions on us producing even more oil than we do are completely artificial. Offshore, east coast, west coast, virtually untouched. East side of the Gulf of America: virtually untouched. Alaska: virtually untouched. The entire interior has yet to be explored. Even known oil fields in California remain undeveloped, because of the environmental movement. There is more oil out there than we have ever produced, just waiting for the restrictions to go off and the price to make it profitable.
Sure, the geology is there to show off potentially commercial deposits, and we could certainly help ourselves a lot should we rid ourselves of federal and state excesses of environmental and land restrictions.
And I agree with you there will likely be significant new discoveries in waters off both coasts once restrictions are removed that will permit seismic and exploratory drilling to finally happen. That, however, you well know will take time, perhaps 10-15 years at a minimum, to realize any benefit.
But there is no new Ghawar awaiting out there for us and no short term fix to suddenly create massive amounts of production to replace ME oil.
And one must still have a commercial venture to justify drilling/producing/refining that crude.
In my professional opinion as a petroleum reservoir engineer/economist involved in decades of exploratory ventures that caused me to actively study petroleum basins across the Americas and worldwide, the geology of this country is not conducive to find or exploit new vast commercially-attractive quantities of crude above what we already have.
The stubborn fact is good, prolific oil might be in water thousands of feet deep in difficult to retrieve environments that take decade(s) to produce, while most oil will be locked up in poor quality reservoirs that require massive expenditure efforts to unlock. Physics just does not permit much of that oil to flow easily through that poor quality rock, so horizontal drilling and multi-stage fraccing is requisite, along with potentially retorting it from the earth. And even after all that effort, one gets a pittance recovery of the oil in place.
On the other hand, natural gas is vastly more abundant and accessible(and cheap), which is the reason LNG makes the news so much these days. The US has a large surplus of it, enough to make it a world top LNG exporter.
That is why I foresee our country becoming a synthetic crude manufacturer during the next decade, using our natural gas which, BTW, flows much, much more easily through that crappy rock compare to crude.
That geology will work to make us self-sufficient, but we are a ways to go for that to happen.
And we will also require much more input from alternative sources of energy such as nuclear and coal to take a load off oil and gas usage.
