Yes. That is not some theory, that is what we are doing right now. Reserves are growing faster than we consume oil. This ‘advanced oil finding technology’ is essentially to drill a hole and look whether there’s any oil down there. People think they have computer models that tell them where all the oil on the planet is, but that’s way overestimating their abilities. They have computer models to make some educated guesses, but basically nobody has a clue how much oil there is. As for example Mukluk, a one-and-a-half billion Dollar dry hole in Alaska, should illustrate. 11 oil companies invested the GDP of Suriname and came up with nothing. That wasn’t with 1920’s technology either, that was in the 80’s.
The sea is like 70% of the earths surface. Assuming that oil is distributed roughly equally, this simple calculation tells us that we can at most access 30% of the oil on land. But since a lot of land area is deserts, arctic, mountains or otherwise inaccessible, we’re probably just scratching at 10% most easily accessible oil on the planet.
Also the high sea is where you go to find oil that authoritarian governments won’t expropriate from you. Which is a political problem.
Oil exploration is largely a government enterprise today. 80% of the worlds oil supply is in the hands of governments. Like any cartel with control over the market, they have no interest in finding more oil because that only drives down the price. In fact their main concern is suppressing new finds. As Redmond mentions, new oil drilling in the US has mostly been banned by established oil interests and their environmentalist lackeys.
Known extractable reserves are not finite, since we’re obviously adding to them. The amount of stuff on the planet is of course finite, but you can not apply that to specific resources. How much oil there is depends on what you are counting as oil. Oil comes in a range of variations from light crude to mud with tar in it. What of that do we consider “oil reserves”? How much oil there is depends on technology, market price and demand. That’s why it doesn’t really make sense to speak of oil as being finite.
Also I hear that thermal depolymerization is working and even financially viable.
We did find oil wells with another 100 billion barrels in the last three years. (85 million barrels a day times 365 days times 3 years = roughly 100 billion barrels). We did use up 100 billion barrels in that time and still added oil to our reserves, which means we must have found that much new oil. Oil isn’t finite so it makes no sense to ask how much we “have left” or when it will run out. It will never run out. We will stop using oil when better technologies (nuclear fission, nuclear fusion, cold fusion, helium from the moon) become cheaper than oil.