Gas and oil are virtually inexhaustible, prices are political and speculative
Danilo Anton

One of the most important and permanent news in the national and worldwide news media is irregular variations in oil prices. When the trend is rising, a generalized alarm is heard that the increase is due to the decrease in existing reserves and that oil is going to end very soon. What are we going to do?
Suddenly, unexpectedly, the price of a barrel that exceeded $ 120 a decade ago began to fall to scratch the $ 20 and then began to rise again reaching almost $ 90 a barrel. In the last days of 2018, it dropped to $ 63 and has remained at that level since then, something that attracts attention when a recent attack on refineries and wells in Saudi Arabia halved the production of the kingdom.

How do you explain it?
The predictions of the shortage of hydrocarbons, which because they are considered "fossils" (which we consider to be basically incorrect) were limited only to the upper layers of the earth's crust, were at risk of depletion, have been refuted by the stubborn reality.
In the light of many data (that are evident) the belief of the fossil origin of oil has been transformed into a dogmatic statement whose veracity is at least doubtful.
In fact, hydrocarbon prices, particularly petroleum prices, are little related to abundance or scarcity, and instead are the result of political decisions and speculative financial movements.
When it was convenient to rise prices to increase the profits of the oil companies, political measures were taken to make it happen, usually because of the unleashing (sometimes very artificial) of wars in the oil countries (eg Irák, Iran, Kuwait , Libya).
Then the ups and downs of international geopolitics, and due to the renewal of the Cold War, it was convenient to lower prices as an instrument to weaken US enemies on the international scene: Russia and its allies, Iran and to a lesser extent Venezuela.
This price decrease, also artificial, produced only in part the consequences expected by the great powers (especially the economic groups that control the United States and Western Europe) because it also affected Saudi Arabia, which due to the waste of resources and the aggressive war in Yemen is having financial problems.
Because of this, there are talks of supposedly irreconcilable allies. Putin, leader of the Russian Federation has just visited Saudi Arabia agreeing important contracts.
As you can see, international politics is less and less a matter of ideas, and in the end, economic and political interests define prices and oil production and comercial flows.
From the book Geography and geopolitics of oil and natural gas, D. Anton, Piriguazú Ediciones