Imbalance -- Supply vs. Demand

"Analysts warned that pump prices could start rising again if there's an imbalance between demand and supply."

I found the above quote nonsensical for the simple reason that if, say, gasoline will supply demand at all, it will always be in balance. The price may increase or decrease, but supply and demand of physical product always match, unless one or the other ceases economic utility. For example, in the early days of refining crude oil for its lamp oil, gasoline was a waste byproduct, at times simply flushed away because it had no use. Indeed, the internal combustion engine owes its development in part to the growing availability of waste gasoline, which could be mixed with air in a carburetor and detonated at the right moment by a spark in a combustion chamber.

In other words, absent demand, gasoline had no price and was an impediment to refiners' efforts to produce something that did. Its availability and energetic properties soon found a use in cities and farms as power for anything that could be hooked up to an internal combustion engine. Suddenly, a waste product had a price that soon rose high enough to stimulate more gasoline production. At no time did a gap appear between the supply and demand for gasoline.

Today, absent rationing, producers of gasoline stand ready to refine and ship it to the highest bidder, who in turn monitors the prices posted by refiners around the world. If a refiner briefly has more gasoline production than orders, he will post a lower price and increase his demand. If he has more bids than he can fulfill from his supply line of crude, he will post a higher price in order to attract more crude to his refinery. At no time in that process will an imbalance or disruption in the flow of gasoline occur. Merely the price will fluctuate, signaling both parties to the transaction that a particular quantity of energy may be had for a price certain at some point on the planet.

A similar expression is that we will soon run out of oil because of a growing imbalance between consumption and supply. However, and separate from the complex problem of guessing how much oil exists, when at some distant time the cost of extracting crude oil rises sufficiently to drive a significant number of consumers to some other energy source, consumption of oil will decrease as the other source takes up the difference at some price. In short, the last barrel of oil will never come out of the ground. It simply will be too costly to use at that time when compared to some other energy source. For that simple reason and in the unforeseeable future oil will go the way of firewood as a major energy source without any physical imbalance between demand and supply.