It is interesting that you say that. I have the same question. I also know of a company that is supposedly using high pressure systems to turn algae into crude oil. My guess is that any carbonaceous substrate might do to supply the basic substrate. Whether it's organic matter from the surface, or from deeper strata or some kind of natural carbon deposit that has been there since roughly the beginning doesn't appear to matter. The paper does make a claim that there are no biological factors in oil production, but I have to wonder why the mainstream theory says that the carbon isotopes in crude oil favor a biological source.

I think the important practical takeaway is that the supply is larger than expected, and abandoning relying on only the current biotic theories will cause us to miss drilling in good candidate zones for oil. Combined with what are likely to be much larger overall oil supplies, the true reason I don't believe we will ever 'run out' of oil is because we'll see improvements in our ability to chemically alter other petro substances, like natural gas for example.

I agree about the Russians.

From the paper:

Throughout the history of the petroleum industry, there have been written numerous articles or reports predicting an imminent demise of that industry all predicated upon assumptions that the supply of producible crude oil in the world was (supposedly) being rapidly depleted and would soon (therefore) be exhausted.(Campbell 1991; Fuller 1993; Campbell 1994; Campbell 1995) In short, the world was (if such were believed), “running out of oil.” Happily, all such predictions have, without a single exception, been proven wrong.

Contrarily, the statistics of the international petroleum industry establish that, far from diminishing, the net known recoverable reserves of petroleum have been growing steadily for the past fifty years. Those statistics show that, for every year since about 1946, the international petroleum industry has discovered at least five new tons of recoverable oil for every three which have been consumed.

In other words, it was recognized by industry a quarter-century before the 70s that we were not 'running out'.

Am I reading you correctly here, King? Your father was a Communist? This is an interesting update.

I'm interested in your take on the population issue.

So on the one hand, your claim is a volumetric one. I don't know whether it is literally true that the entire world population could fit in the area of Texas. Maybe it is true, but is it vacuously true, like only in the case where we were standing nose-to-nose could we achieve that?

So the question becomes more complex, because on the other hand it isn't just about absolute space, but all of the consumable resources in that space and factors like quality of life and all of the social variables that are effected by human proximity.

I personally think everything to do with climate fear-mongering is baseless, but intuitively, I do perceive we have something like an ecological crisis. 8-9 billion people all consuming, and consuming, and consuming and throwing their waste and industrial byproducts into the environment without much forethought to the long-term sensitivity of the ecosystem to these changes.