“We don’t observe the boundary effects in our modern economy and haven’t throughout oil’s history because reserve estimates have grown over time and will continue to grow for the foreseeable future.”

Mineral resource alarmists, reflecting a fixity/depletionist view of the world, begin by arguing that “you must admit that there is a fixed amount of oil on this earth.” This is true in the purely physical sense that roughly 2 million barrels annually are created by the earth versus the 35 billion barrels consumed in a year.

Oil is a non-renewable resource, but that doesn’t mean our economic models should treat it as a drawdown of static inventory. A great example for the issue of fixity in resource economics is reservoir modelling for a singular oil well. In reservoir engineering, there are flow regime equations that model how the fluid moves from the formation into the wellbore.…