When will we really run out of oil? In 1949, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, among its centennial celebration articles, published M. King Hubbert’s paper, “Energy from Fossil Fuels,” where he noted that oil was first produced in Rumania in 1857, and two years later in the U.S., and expressed concern that the world would in a relatively short period run out of this fossil fuel. He had not quite yet perfected his bell shape curve prognostications.
However, in March of 1956, at the Spring meeting of the American Petroleum Institute, Hubbert, as Chief Consultant for Shell Oil Company, presented a paper called, “Nuclear Energy and Fossil Fuels.” He predicted that U.S. oil production would reach a peak between 1965 and 1970. However, he was wrong, by one year, as oil peaked in 1971. Lost in all the oil were his other prediction peaks: coal about 2150 and nuclear energy, for the next few centuries. There was a sense that fossil fuels would not be sufficient for the anticipated enormous increase in world energy consumption, and, perhaps, nuclear power was the answer, if “mankind can solve its international problems and not destroy itself with nuclear weapons.” He might well be even more prescient than we take him to be.
But that was all a half century ago. At the other extreme of guestimation is Matt Savinar, youngish lawyer with absolutely no technical training, for his bachelor’s degree was in political science. He is the author of Life After the Oil Crash, which he made available as a free download prior to the 2004 presidential elections. His website, by the same name, is the #1 “Peak Oil” site on Google. His message is simple: “civilization as we know it is coming to an end soon.” He accesses scientists and synthesizes a conclusion. We are not running out of oil, he says, but the peak might have already been reached (and if not yet, pretty soon), which is the problem, because the “price will skyrocket, oil-dependent economies will crumble, and resource wars will explode.” Could he be right? Absolutely!
So when will we reach Peak Oil? Chevron, the most arthritic of the oil dinosaurs, itself floated an ad saying that the world consumes two barrels of oil for every barrel discovered. In their web page (http://willyoujoinus.com) they say the era of easy oil is over. BP reported in the Year 2000 that world oil production per capita peaked in 1979. That in itself kind of says it all.
Former wildcatter (he found oil where it wasn’t supposed to be) T. Boone Pickens has surmised that we’re already at the peak. The head of BP Capital, a hedge fund that has returned 800% since 2001, he further went on to say in the Houston Chronicle on March 1, 2007, that Norway, Canada, Mexico and Russia are declining producers.
Thus, we won’t run out of oil, but we might have already reached the point when half the recoverable oil has been produced, that location on the curve called Peak Oil, and if not, we certainly will in the next few years. Then, oil becomes more difficult to extract and more expensive to produce. Compounding the predicament are two other impacting factors: the increasing demands from China, India and other developing countries, and the looming calamity of Global Warming. The latter happening means that liquid fuels from coal or the exploitation of tar sands and heavy oils, cannot be safely considered because coal, for example, sends more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than oil.
Petroleum remains at $126+/barrel.
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