I find these oil report news pieces to be incredibly lacking almost all of the time. First of all, this person is speaking predictions and postulations without

I find these oil report news pieces to be incredibly lacking almost all of the time. First of all, this person is speaking predictions and postulations without showing a single piece of data. Not a good sign. I'm very skeptical, because the net return on oil reserves has been steadily declining since the early 1900s. Shale oil is extremely expensive to extract/process and also relatively dangerous. The production cost ratio is less than 10:1 if I recall correctly, while in the early days of oil drilling the ratio was in the hundreds to one. You could pretty much poke a hole in the ground and have sellable oil gushing out with no further effort. Now it's a struggle to get just past the "economically feasible" point. The tarsands in Canada are a great example of this. Currently they are sitting at a ratio of about 5:1. And that's also a very dangerous, and highly polluting extraction process. Another problem is oil reporting is context. They'll throw out a number like 169 billion barrels of oil. That's the current reported bitumen content in the tarsands. Sounds huge. If you do the math, that's about five years' worth at current world consumption. Five years. For one of North Americas largest and most championed reserves. With the extraction ratio taken into account, we can slice one year off of that. And if the demand trend continues it's even less. I'm not convinced that a few percentage points of extra fuel efficiency in consumer vehicles is really going to make a significant dent in demand.