Sec. Wright: "We Will Never Come Remotely Close to Running Out of Hydrocarbons"

Michael Chapman

The good news about energy couldn’t be more clear: it is “massively abundant” and “always will be.” That’s according to Energy Secretary Chris Wright, who told an audience at the Cato Institute that “we will never ever come remotely close to running out of hydrocarbons”—oil, natural gas, or coal.

That message stands in contrast to decades of warnings from climate change activists, from governments, from movies, and from the press. It also happens to be supported by the data.

Speaking at a May 13 “fireside chat” hosted by Cato’s Director of Energy and Environmental Policy Studies Travis Fisher and President and CEO Peter Goettler, Secretary Wright discussed “How America Can Unleash the Next Energy Revolution.” Wright, an energy entrepreneur and MIT graduate, is a supporter of all forms of energy, including nuclear, geothermal, solar, fusion, and hydrocarbons. But he’s also clear-eyed about where the world actually gets its power.

“I think the bigger message on energy is that it is massively abundant—and it always will be—that’s like the biggest misunderstanding,” said Wright. “I always tell people, 90% of the oil and gas and coal that were underground 500 years ago will be underground a million years from now. We will never ever come remotely close to running out of hydrocarbons, which means you need better technology and innovations to eventually eat into their market share.”

“But that will happen slowly,” he said. “I’m all in on that. I worked on solar energy in graduate school. I worked on nuclear energy in undergrad, I worked on geothermal energy, super excited about fusion. So, we want to get energy in as many ways as we can. But the biggest innovations the rest of my lifetime in energy are almost certainly going to be in oil, gas, and coal because they are what matter.”

The numbers back him up. According to the Institute for Energy Research, at the “current rate of consumption, the United States has 227 years of oil supply from technically recoverable oil reserves.” With newer extraction technologies, that supply will grow. 

IER also reported that the US has 130 years of natural gas from technically recoverable resources and 912 years of coal “at 2022 consumption rates.” And those figures will grow as extraction technology advances — just as horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing unlocked reserves that previous generations considered untouchable.

Which brings us to a telling pattern. For well over a century, experts have been predicting we’d run out of oil—and they’ve been wrong every single time. As Tech News tallied: 

• The Titusville Herald (Pennsylvania) reported in July 1909: “Petroleum has been used for less than 50 years, and it is estimated that the supply will last about 25 or 30 years longer.” 
• In October 1919, Oil and Gas News warned: “… within the next two to five years the oil fields of this country will reach their maximum production and from then on we will face an ever-increasing decline.”
• In 1937, Captain H.A. Stuart, director of the naval petroleum reserves, told the US Senate that America’s present supply of oil “will last only 15 years.”
• In December 1945, the Times Recorder (Zanesville, Ohio) said, “Faced with the threat that our nation’s petroleum reserves may last only 13 years, geologists are striving to tap the almost limitless supply of oil located beneath the seas off our coastline.”
• In 1956, Shell Development executive M. King Hubbert predicted “that peak oil production would be reached in the next 10 to 15 years and after that would gradually decline,” reported the Corpus Christi Times.
• In 1972, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists declared, “At any rate, US oil supplies will last only 20 years. Foreign supplies will last 40 or 50 years ….”
• The US Department of Energy warned in 1977 that “world oil production will likely peak in the early 1990s, and from that point on will be on a declining curve. By the early part of the 21^st century, we must face the prospect of running out of oil and natural gas.”
• Nobel physicist Hans Bethe, who worked on the A‑bomb, said in 1980 that the world would hit peak oil production before 2000, and then production would fall to zero within 20 years.
• A 2007 GAO report noted, “Most studies estimate that oil production will peak sometime between now and 2040.”

In June 2025, Texas Railroad Commissioner Wayne Christian put it plainly: “The media are reporting new predictions that oil production in America is in irreversible decline. … As a regulator of the nation’s largest oil and natural gas producing state, I’ve seen these scary headlines many times before, but here’s the good news: they are always wrong.”

Always. For 120 years running.

The doomsayers share a common blind spot: they treat resources as fixed and human ingenuity as irrelevant. They build models, run projections, and declare deadlines—then engineers go out and prove them wrong. American innovation, operating in a competitive marketplace, has an unbroken track record of finding more fuel, extracting it more efficiently, and expanding what’s possible. 

The lesson of the last century isn’t that we’re running out of energy. It’s that we keep underestimating how much we have—and how clever we are at getting it.

Source: https://www.cato.org/blog/sec-wright-we-will-never-come-remotely-close-running-out-hydrocarbons