Forty years ago, the conventional wisdom about oil was that we were running out of it and needed to find ways to conserve. Twenty years ago, it was faddish for people in the oil business to talk about the then-assumed fact that “all the elephants have been found,” with the word “elephant” referring to massive reserves of crude oil and/or natural gas. I cannot begin to count the number of times I heard that bit of conventional wisdom expressed by speakers at IPAA or API conferences during that period of time around the turn of the century.
