> More and more oil and natural gas reserves have been discovered and much of it in just the last 10 years (including off the coast of Gaza, go look it up). >

> More and more oil and natural gas reserves have been discovered and much of it in just the last 10 years (including off the coast of Gaza, go look it up). > > This means they are not running out like most people think. You seem to be missing the point - I never said anything was running out. You seem to be arguing about our current civilization. If you imagine a future upcoming civilization (post-apocalypse, whatever), having progressed to an iron age stage, how on earth would they even discover those deposits hidden deep beneath the sea? They would have no reason to drill there in the first place. The easy-to-extract close-to-land-surface deposits are long gone. Humanity would have to somehow progress to industrial stages without the help of fossil fuels that we've enjoyed, which seriously restricts growth. And thus we're talking about much wider timescales than what we've so far experienced. The other reply had a very interesting idea regarding wood gas and that could be an option for a cool future cyberpunk civilization that would allow for somewhat constrained population growth (assuming balance is found and it doesn't lead to another Easter Island). > But they will never run out, just become more expensive to extract. You are very much correct here. It's more expensive (= complex & energy-intensive) both to extract and to discover in the first place. A future civilization wouldn't make these discoveries by chance, like we happened to discover oil. Unless we'd store a Rosetta Stone type thing for future civilizations instructing them how to do so. And even then they'd require tools that would likely not be viable without first having fossil fuels.