Oil Getting Harder To Get

All of the easy to drill oil fields on the planet are either in production or used up and dying. So in the endless search more oil to slake the growing thirst for it, oil companies have been turning to harder and harder to produce oil fields. This difficulty and cost of production means the oil companies must have a high oil price to make a profit. So as we are forced into oil patches that would have been considered worthless decades ago, we will have to pay more and more at the pump. The video below is an excerpt from a National Geographic special detailing the problem.

To get some perspective on the difficulty getting this marginal oil, consider this from the video. Chevron is producing the Kern River oil field by using a technique requiring the injection of steam to liquefy the thick petroleum enough to extract it. The amount of energy they use in the hot steam is enough to power all the air conditioners of the world. That is some tough oil to get!