I took that wikipedia link and found something interesting. Near the bottom there was mention about oil shale and another link, I don’t know much about it so I started to read it. Current methods of turning it into fuel are messy, costly and environmentally unfriendly. Apparently other countries do it but we don’t. But it does work. Then I read further, turns out, we are the middle east of oil shale, with over 62% of the world’s supply and that amount is 3 times the world’s oil supply. Oddly enough, it is located primarily on government owned land.
It’s not a stretch of the imagination to think that the technology will change before oil runs out. If I were a conspiracy theorist, I’d be curious about the current situation. The worlds oil reserves are about 1.3 trillion barrels. The world’s shale can currently yield about 3 trillion barrels. 62% of that is in the U.S. and 70% of that is on government land. So the government owns the equivalent of about 1.5 trillion barrels, more than all of the combined known liquid petroleum in the world.
Naw, I’m sure it’s just a coincidence. I’m sure they will never figure out a way to cleanly convert it into fuel because 191 years of our entire oil needs sitting in Utah and Colorado, there’s really not much money in that.