every time oil prices went up, I heard this claim
this has been the experience of the world since at least the 1930s. even back then, Cassandras were predicting that oil supplies would be exhausted within a decade. they also predicted the same thing about the US. since none of the predictions came true, it led to complacency.
but indeed there is a finite amount of oil in the world. there is only a narrow depth band in which petroleum is generated--about 7500 to 15,000 feet. any shallower and the earth is not hot enough to crack the biomatter. any deeper and it's too hot--you crack the oil and get stuff like gas. (of course, subsequent to generation, the pockets of oil can shift up and down, so they may be found at a different depth than where they were generated.)
run of the mill oil rigs in the US could already drill down to the bottom of the oil window in the 1930s.
this is to say that it's not like we are going to drill down 100,000 feet and find more oil. any biomatter that deep has been zapped. also, further R&D on discovery and drilling tech is not likely to have as much return. this is because the big oil cos have invested heavily in tech since at least the 1980s (their ROI was much higher for oil than anything else, so they plowed money into R&D). all the low-hanging fruit in this area have been plucked.
as oil prices move permanently higher, more marginal reserves will become exploitable under higher cost structures (maybe shale at $100 a barrel :), but this is still not enough supply to change the overall picture.
back in the 1950s, Texas ruled the oil world. in 1956 a guy named M. King Hubbert predicted US oil production would peak in the early 1970s. people laughed, but it turned out he was dead right. oil production follows a Gaussian curve over time. it increases with growing production and discoveries on the left side of the curve, but eventually these things run out and are eclipsed by demand. this point marks the top of the production curve. for US production, they named it Hubbert's Peak.
following the techniques initially used by Hubbert to predict the US production peak, Deffeyes has put the peak for total global production as occurring somewhere between the early 2000s and 2009, probably in the 2003-2005 window. the variance depends on the ultimate exploitable reserves one assumes. probably a reasonable assumption (according to Deffeyes--i am no expert) is 1.8 trillion barrels. this gives you a peak date around 2001-2002.
however, being generous, one could assume 2 trillion barrels, which would push out the peak to 2009. those extra 200 billion barrels are a true Pollyanna assumption--like adding 22 brand-new Prudhoe Bay discoveries to known reserves, when we will be lucky to get more than one in the real world.
even under the Pollyanna assumption, however, our ever-increasing global energy requirements are way too large and petroleum-dependent to avoid a massive oil shock somewhere down the road in the next decade. the shift to alternative energy sources is not going to happen even as fast as the incremental demand increase for petrol from China alone. |
