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One thing with proven reserves is that they can be deceptive. It's only worth proving reserves so far. It's expensive to prove reserves, and even if you think they're definitely there, that expense to prove they are there only makes sense to actually prove them if there's a reason to do so -- if you're trying to get investment dollars, you only need to justify enough to get your initial investment and enough to stay in business. There are some mines for example that start off with a 8-10 year mine life and run for maybe 50-100 years because they just keep proving more resources every year, but each year the official proven reserves remain 8-10 years until the place closes.

So it's a limited non-renewable resource with a clear environmental impact on extraction and utilization and when we do start to run out there's going to be global consequences in many industries that people don't even understand yet because its use is so prolific, but we have to be careful about using certain numbers because accurate predictions are important to getting long-term buy-in on stuff like this. Consistently predict wrong, and people start to assume the prediction is fundamentally wrong when it's only wrong in the specific details.