Can't make people rich when only needing a single mine to support the world, hence it wont happen in this generation of capitalist morons who only care about themselves
you forget that capitalism is also about opportunity.. how do you know there can't be someone interested to invest in this and basically getting insane profits in a new market with no competitors for quite a while?
..and most importantly how do the "evil" oil companies know someone isn't already getting ahead with these groundbreaking technologies to ruin them? someone like Google for example.. pants would be shat on.
this is what i said myself before: established oil companies might not want it, but all around them there's a lot of potential players like Google etc. who will not flinch in taking this opportunity