In the 1970s, after the last hike in oil prices, the OPEC had lots of extra cash. What to do?  They stuck it in US banks, including Walter Wriston's Citibank, the guy who famously said that "nations don't go bankrupt", and led the banking community, pied piper like, to put those petrodollars in developing countries, particularly Latin America.  Long story short, Latin America went broke, although the IMF arranged things so that the US banks didn't.

And to address Eric's main point: how much is all of that oil worth if you subtract all of the external costs?  Probably wouldn't be worth extracting (not "producing", by the way, the Earth did that).

Jaibailo drives me buts but I can see why energy prices have ballooned. It did not surprise me and was called for some very complex market signals several years ago.

The term "energy" just means the potential ability to do work, and "power" means unit of energy over time already done, like horsepower hours or kilowatt hours.  

As Jon Rynn says, there were some goofs and blunders but that was yesterday, with some stories that would raise the hairs on the back of your neck.  -sammie

Onward through the fog

To ask what will be the end of all that oil wealth.  Will it be utilized wisely to ease the transition away from oil?  Or will the end be the further concentration and squandering by a tiny minority obsessed with luxurious consumption and building alien colonies on desert sands?  

And among the users of that oil, will it be burned with tremendous inefficiencies while propelling 5000 pound steel chariots down the fire highway or will it be made into products like plastic tubing for geothermal systems that help us reduce our consumption of coal?  

And within our own country, what becomes of the wealth we generate here partly by our wasteful consumption of oil?  Much of that wealth is being stolen from us by wall street barons who are building up massive personal porfolios at the expense of investments in critical infrastructure.  

While I also lament all the external costs of burning all that oil, as economic beings, we must ask the important economic questions about what leads us to destroy the planet while we ride on this black river to questionable ends.  

And among the users of that oil, will it be burned with tremendous inefficiencies while propelling 5000 pound steel chariots down the fire highway or will it be made into products like plastic tubing for geothermal systems that help us reduce our consumption of coal?

To put a little meat to this thought, the plastic tubing for one 150 ft. deep geothermal loop costs about $400.00 retail.  I don't know how much oil is consumed to make that one loop.  For a home heating/cooling system it takes one loop per one ton of capacity.  So, for a 3 ton unit, the cost is going to be about $1200.  There is a warranty of 50 years on the plastic loops.  

Now consider that $1200 will purchase about 300 gallons of gas priced at $4.00 per gallon.  At 20 mpg that 300 gallons will take you about 6000 miles or probably about a half year of driving for many US drivers.  

My intentions are to illustrate the difference between using the oil resource wisely for lasting effect or using it unwisely for temporary and unsustainable "gain".  

You can argue that we can do both, but our profligate use of it is raising the cost of using it wisely and could be making the long term use of it for beneficial purposes practically impossible.  We should be squeezing the flood gates on this vital resource and turning a Mississippi scale flow into a very long lasting, seeping spring flow.