> It's not like one day someone's going to say "oh, shit! we ran out! sorry, no more oil." That's not necessarily true. Well extraction curves decline exponent

> It's not like one day someone's going to say "oh, shit! we ran out! sorry, no more oil." That's not necessarily true. Well extraction curves decline exponentially with the highest amount extracted early in the well's life. Well discovery follows a very steep increase followed by a very steep decrease. The new fraking boom gave the extraction curve a new "bump" so it looks more like two gaussians overlapping each other. But the deposits were already discovered for the most part, so the discovery curve has remained consistent. And the drop off of the discovery curve is also exponential. Ok, what all that boils down to is if the extraction curve doesn't keep resetting the drop off goes from global glut to largely unavailable in 20-30 years. So when it runs out, for all practical purposes, you could easily be talking to a 25 year old who clearly remembers when everyone had a gas car, yet all the gas stations are closed. Which would definitely feel like an "Oh shit!" to anyone experiencing it. edit To clarify a bit, that's 20-30 years from peak to pit. So if society doesn't seriously talk about the problem for 10-15 years (totally believable, we were heading downward before fraking), then argues over the solution for a couple of presidencies for ~10 years (again totally believable...), then you only have maybe 5 or 10 years to adjust societies power sources. And it takes 7-10 years to build a nuclear power plant. Oh. Shit.