An economist showed why you don't dig up all the oil at once, even with no regulation

In 1931, Harold Hotelling asked why owners of a finite resource like oil or minerals don't just extract it all immediately and invest the cash. His answer: in an efficient market, the price of an unextracted resource left in the ground should rise at roughly the rate of interest, so owners are indifferent between selling now or waiting. Pumping too fast or too slow both leave money on the table. 'Hotelling's rule' remains the baseline model economists use for resource depletion.

— Harold Hotelling, The Economics of Exhaustible Resources — Journal of Political Economy, 1931