Saudi Arabia says PLENTY OF OIL

Dirty little secret nobody talks about:

The oil that the world commodities markets based gas prices on is "light sweet" crude. It is low in sulfur content and require relatively low amount of energy to distill and refine into other products (such as gasoline, Propane, Butane, kerosene). That is the crude is that getting harder and harder to find. It is also the top level of crude in just about every oil reserve.

The other grade of crude is "heavy sour" (no chicken jokes please). This is high in sulfur content, VERY expensive to refine with equipment built for light sweet refinement, and relatively low in demand. The profit margin for processing this oil is relatively lower than with light sweet, such the time involved in refinement is generally twice as long due to the high sulfur content, which is unacceptable in gasoline formulas.

Then there is "alternative" sources of oil, such as recycled petroleum from plastics, motor oil, and petrochemicals, as well as oil extracted from shale rock, which is essentially crystallized oil. All of these sources WERE high-cost, and high risk because one bad batch could ruin months of extraction. However, with advances in technology, the chances of being successful at extraction are much better. As for heavy sour production, only a few company in the world have retrofitting to exclusive heavy sour refinement, one of them being Valero Petroleum, which is expanding its chain of low-cost gas stations in all directions. The other is Murphy USA, which is known for its stations being put in Wal-Mart parking lots.

So the answer is that there is no immediate energy crisis, but that will change as time goes on. If the US is smart, and gets its act together, it will discover zero-point energy quickly and being moving into ultra-cheap, ultra-advanced energy sources sooner rather than later.