Are We Running Out of Oil?
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
No resource has inspired so great a fear of running out as oil has. This fear is not new. And every time in the last hundred years that an expert predicted we would run out, that prediction has been wrong—and not just wrong, but wrong by a huge margin. In 1891, for example, the U.S. Geological Survey stated that there was little chance that oil would be found in Kansas or Texas. Since then, 14 billion barrels of oil have been produced from just those two states. In 1914 an official of the U.S. Bureau of Mines claimed that the total future U.S. production would be 5.7 billion barrels. In fact, production has already been six times that figure. In 1920 the director of the Geological Survey said that peak annual crude production had almost been reached. By 1948 annual U.S. production was four times its 1920 level. Finally, in one of the most astoundingly wrong predictions, the Interior Department stated in 1939 that U.S. oil supplies would run out in thirteen years. Of course, over sixty years later, the United States is still producing oil.
—DRH
Source: Baumol, Blackman, and Wolff, p. 214.
econlib.org |
