Know that crude oil should always increase in the long term as long as two truths exist: 1) The world needs to use oil, and 2) Oil continues to be considered a finite resource.
I think you have a solid play here.
I don't agree quite as much with the finite resource part, I mean it is obviously finite, but I think at a certain price there is enough oil that can be found to keep the world going for the next few hundred years.
Oil has been there only for a hundred and sixty years (I mean since James Young had invented the process by which to distill kerosene from petroleum in 1847), and I doubt that oil can keep the world going for the next few hundred years in the way it is being used today. But that's not my point. What is more likely, in the nearest future (within the next 50 years at max) the humankind will switch from using oil as primarily fuel to something else (say, electricity).