Assuming there is a finite supply of easily accessible crude oil…
Supposing some crafty 007 Bond supervillain serriptitiously bought up crude oil on the world markets over the decades and stored it in old oil fields or reservoirs in the United States. When the world oil supply runs out, this guy would be sitting on the last source of crude on the planet, stroking his longhair white cat and laughing maniacally.
Is this legit? Could anybody really do this? What if (instead of a private owner) this was done by the US government?
Not really. By far the most efficient place to store oil you’re not planning to use for a while is in the field where it started.
To get an idea of what’s involved, consider the US’ Strategic Petroleum Reserve. We’ve got the capacity to store about 570 MM bbl of oil. To do that, we don’t use much in the way of tanks – we use salt caverns. In addition to the expense of buying 570 MM bbl of oil (call it $23 billion), we pay another $20 MM to maintain it. I don’t know what the government paid to build the storage facilities in the first place, but our supervillian would pay more (secrecy, construction costs in whatever hidden place he chose, etc.) And there’s some depletion due to evaporation, spills and whatnot. So you’d have to be pretty stinking rich just to replicate the SPR.
The SPR hold all of 30 days of US consumption.
What that means is that even if our supervillian had a hundred billion dollars he’d only be able to buy a few months’ worth of US consumption. By the time we’d theoretically “run out” (which is itself problematic – see any of hundreds of threads on the subject here and in GQ) the world would be frantically looking for alternatives and the guy with an extra couple months’ supply would be a tiny piece of the equation.
I’m currently taking a number of relevant university courses. One man (company, criminal organisation etc.) Controlling the world’s last supply of oil would not result in a debilitatingly large increase in fuel prices unless it happened instantly. There are a variety of chemical processes which can convert various fuels, including coal which there is a lot more of than oil, into many of the products obtained from crude oil, such as gasoline and plastics. Some have been used commercially to give countries without oil reserves fuel independence (e.g. in South Africa during the apartheid era).
However, they are not currently economically viable with the oil market as it is. Market forces dictate that they will become so significantly before oil reserves are fully depleted.
One guy hoarding the whole lot is still subject to market forces if he wants it to be worth anything. The free market demands alternatives.