It takes money to make money

Or, it takes energy to get energy. This graph shows how much energy is required to make various energy sources work.
The red is the amount of energy consumed by drilling engines, explosives, refineries, pressure vessels, stills, etc. The blue is the amount of useful energy yielded by the process.
Notice the broad yellow arrow marked "ERoEI Required to sustain current Industrial Civilization." Notice also that favorite energy sources of the left and the right (bio mass, nuclear, tar sands, ethanol) are on the wrong side of that arrow.
Bottom line. We need conventional oil and gas unless we accept dropping back to a pre industrial standard of living.