We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the
drugs began to take hold. I remember "nightjar" nightjar@insert my
surname here.uk.com saying something like:

How long is a piece of string? Currently the oil companies are discovering
new reserves of fossil fuels at a much faster rate than the rate at which
their use increases

Peak Oil is on us already, according to some very knowledgeable folk in
the oil industry.

(except for 2005, which had an unusually rapid, but
short lived, increase in the rate of use, so that it just about matched new
finds). In any case, for the foreseeable future, the limitation on how much
fossil fuel is available is not what actual reserves there are in the Earth,

No reserve is 100% obtainable.


but how much of those it is economic to harvest. As the price rises, so the
technology to access more difficult reserves will become profitable to use
and the recoverable reserves will increase.

Aye, and then there's the Falklands oil. That was reckoned to be
economically retrievable when oil prices reach 80usd /barrel. Mind you,
that was back in the 80s, and I don't think deepwater drilling has
improved that enough in the past 20 years to make it realistic.
--

Dave