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Oil fields really do deplete, and anyone who thinks otherwise is smoking crack. Even the giant Prudhoe Bay Field on the north slope of Alaska has begun an irreversible decline.

I invite anyone who thinks that more oil can be found anywhere by simply drilling deeper to put their money where their mouth is. There are any number of drilling funds out there where people can invest in an oil well.

In some parts of the country basement rocks can be reached at a fairly shallow level. A well to test basement rocks would be fairly cheap until you got to the basement granite. Then you'll spend a fortune on drill bits, but it's one way to test a theory. It's already been tested to my satisfaction, but anyone is free to pony up and try it for themselves. They'll get rich if they're right.

Unfortunately, there still exists a technology barrier to drilling incredibly deep wells. If money is no object, you could build a rig capable of drilling 100 miles deep or more.

But, as you said, it's the temperatures and pressures that stop you. At some point, your drilling tools start failing, basically because they are melting. We run into this all the time in the industry, and glib assurances that all we have to do is drill deeper don't wash. It's like trying to drill into the side of a volcano.

We continue to find oil in places where it wasn't possible to explore even a few years ago. The waters off the Texas and Lousiana coast have been very promising. It wasn't possible to drill in over a mile of water before, and there are strange and bizarre things that happen on the ocean floor that 99% of Americans don't realize. Mudflows, hundreds of feet thick, flow like rivers in these depths snapping off wells like they were toothpicks. We are learning to overcome many of these obstacles.

I can assure everyone that we wouldn't be doing those things if all we had to do was "drill deeper" in our existing fields. I wish!

According to Gold, two geologists -- Robert Mahfoud and James Beck, say fields in the Middle East are refilling. And the same thing had happened in the Gulf of Mexico.

There doesn't appear to be any question that some fields can refill themselves, and that basement rock oil exists in large quantities in some places, but the jury is still out on where the oil comes from. I just can't wait until we can get that pipeline built and tap into the Caspian Sea region so we can quit making the Arabs so rich.