Will the oil ever run out? That was certainly the fear in the early 1970s, when an influential study called Limits to Growth warned about resource depletion and the Arab oil embargo of 1973-74 quadrupled oil prices. By the early 1980s, oil was selling for more than $30 a barrel. But the doomsayers forgot how dramatically technological innovation can alter the outlook. New technologies made it possible to locate oil and extract it economically from areas as remote as the arctic tundra and the North Sea. And in the sunny waters of the Gulf Coast of Louisiana, where the first major off-shore wells were drilled by Kerr-McGee in 1947, the costs of deep-water drilling continue to fall.

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