And common logic says that a resource that is finish will, sooner or later, finish. Sooner or later — well, you're probably right, for some definition of "late

And common logic says that a resource that is finish will, sooner or later, finish. Sooner or later — well, you're probably right, for some definition of "later." But the only reason people burn oil is because it's a cheap source of energy. As supply diminishes relative to demand, price will increase, but then it won't be a source of cheap energy anymore: it'll be an expensive one, and electric will take over. (Let's ignore, for the sake of argument, the fact that oil isn't finite and can be produced in a lab from organic materials, albeit expensively; we can also ignore that oil will naturally form over millions of years from decomposing plant and animal materials, since that's largely irrelevant to humanity as we know it.) Eventually, even as oil supply diminishes and prices go up, even as people switch away to electricity, someone somewhere will still have a need to consume oil. Years after it's barely useful anymore, even though battery tech has gotten so good it surpasses the internal combustion engine dollar for dollar even ignoring the tax credits, there'll be a lab buried away still burning it for something. And finally, some day, the last drop — or at least, the last easily-recoverable natural drop – of oil will be burned. But, to be honest, it won't really matter. The scariest energy-related crisis facing us in the foreseeable future isn't the inability to burn oil or other cheap but dirty energy sources: it's the ease with which everyone currently does burn them, slowly but surely smothering, melting, and then freezing the planet. I hope the BP geologist is right; I'd rather face peak oil than an ice age.