Roeben Gisbert: no oil exists and prices aren't falling

Roeben Gisbert and the oil that, according to the thesis, does not exist

There is no oil. Just like that, no caveats. The statement attributed to Roeben Gisbert has peine a debate that was considered settled: the one about crude running out. The awkward detail is that it arrived with the barrel trading high, not at zero. If there really were no oil, someone would have to explain why the market keeps paying for it.

Rock oil: etymology as an argument

The old Russian translation of petroleum —"rock oil"— is cited as proof that crude rises from the Earth on its own, with no fossilized organisms involved. The version of fermented dinosaur juice brewed over millions of years remains the dominant one, though it does not answer every question. Some argue that scarcity is a work of political engineering, with Agenda 2030 as the horizon and prices propped up by restricting supply. Against this weighs a simple argument: what can be manufactured at will does not command such a high price.

Peak oil, properly explained

Here lies the sharpest point of the whole matter: crude does not run out; the technical capacity to extract it does. Both things can be true at once —there is a great deal of oil underground and, at the same time, the amount that can be extracted at a reasonable cost is shrinking—. That distinction, which almost never appears in headlines, completely changes the diagnosis. It is not a problem of geological depletion; it is a problem of engineering and profitability.

---

And yet the slogan resurfaces every so often, with Trump, Pilingui, Zelensky or Iran in the background. No one has yet explained how the absence of oil squares with the existence of a price. The most elegant answer came, unintentionally, from the argument itself: if it truly did not exist, it would trade at €0.