Text taken from the following source ; http://lifeaftertheoilcrash.net/BreakingNews.html


Probably the most frequent question I get is "how much time is left?" My reply for the past four plus years has always been "I don't know, a few days, a few months, a few years, maybe longer, maybe not. I wish I knew." Well, Ken Deffeyes just published an analysis at his blog that gives us some type of rough idea. His conclusions appears to be that oil at $300 a barrel will produce, more or less, a total economic shutdown:

So while it is still impossible to answer the question of "How much time is left", we might be able to use the price of oil and gas as some rough indicators of where we're at. We're hovering around $125/barrel and $4/gallon right now and already seeing significant slowdowns. Shutdowns likely begin around $200/barrel and $8/gallon. At $300/barrel and $12/gallon everything stops.

If prices continue to rise at a pace even roughly resembling the trajectory of the past couple of years, this gives us anywhere between 6-24 months before total shutdown.
Of course, the pace could slow down just as easily as it could accelerate.

Most of that oil is imported from thousands of miles away. (Even the domestically produced stuff is typically imported from hundreds of miles.) The production, import, and refining infrastructure to do all of this is dependent on extremely complex and highly globalized networks of finance and telecommunications that are unlikely to exist in sufficient capacities for very long once oil settles in above $200-$250/barrel.