I see people saying “oil is running out” quite a lot, and i understand its a finite resource, but is it REALLY going to run out anytime soon??

Has anyone done a theoretical maximum calculation based on the history of earth? Surely it if took 2 billion years to form there must be loads of it left.

Maybe theres sufficiently large quantities that we could never hope to get anywhere near using it all without destroying our environment?

In which case, IF we can figure out how to use it without damaging the environment we have a very cheap large source of energy that we’d be crazy not to use.

Apparently there were 8 yrs worth left 12 years ago.

I bought a litre of extra virgin yesterday for some cooking, and need 1.8 litres of transmission oil for my car next week. Now I’m worried.

There is loads left although no idea on estimated figure.

We are held to ransom by the cartels. There are dirty great ships full of the stuff waiting off shore for the right price before they deliver their load.

Reason why the Argies rattled their cage recently: There is an estimated 20 billion barrels under the Falklands…

Depending on where you read about it up to 100 years at current rate of consumption. Trouble being that the ways to extract it are getting more expensive which causes the price to rise.

It took 2 billion years to make whats there, which is a tiny fraction of the plant/annimal matter that could become oil, but didn’t die in the right place, oil forms under quite specific circumstances.

The north sea resembles the water swirling round the plughole in your bathroom. Even Saudi is looking more towards petrochemicals rather than exporting oil to maximise profit from whats left.

The petrol pumps wont run dry, but prices wil rise ahead of inflation, I’d be suprised if we’re not talking £3/litre being considdered cheep by 2020 so either that will kill our usage, or legislation or guilt will (bit like we kicked the CFC habbit).

I think the ‘oil is running out’ statement really means ‘the oil we can extract at a sensible cost is running out’

There’s loads of the stuff that is too expensive/difficult to exploit with current technology.

Plus, there’s countries like Brazil who don’t have the money to exploit their oil, but also won’t let the yanks in to do it… so it just sits there…

That’s my (simplistic) view of the situation anyway 🙂

There’s loads left, it’ll just start costing a lot more, particularly if the whiteboys keep invading other countries to promote regime change.

(bit like we kicked the CFC habbit).

We didn’t – we found alternative refrigerant and aerosol propellant gases…

They have just discovered a field off the brazilian coast estimated 40 years worth of oil. As somebody said, the more the oil price rises, the more viable it becomes to go deeper/harder to reach places. We are being inundated at the moment for some of our equipment being used for deep wells.

I know a few people who work in the extraction industry and they seem to feel that oil is unlikely to run out soon but likely to become very, very expensive.

So that’s OK then.

(bit like we kicked the CFC habbit).

We didn’t – we found alternative refrigerant and aerosol propellant gases..

Shaky fact alert!
I remember reading that the alternative to CFC that was decided upon was a very political decision based on the abilities of american industry, and it is actually a massively bad greenhouse gas. Doh!

EDIT: Actually, was this refrigerant… ah I forget

We reached peak oil production a couple of years ago.

There is a finite volume of oil. Its generation relies on the right geological conditions to allow its formation.

You also have to take in to account that much oil isnt extractable due to depth and location.

In addition the formation of oil and gas reserves take millions of years so will never be replenished any where near as fast as we have exploited them.

Oil shale deposits run into the billions.

Totally off the top of my head but Israel alone has 100billion that have been discovered recently. Currently they import all their oil but this could be reversed.

but remember demand is also grwoing massively in china and india + population
Some countries Russia and USA reserves wil last a couple of decades at most th emiddle east wil last for over a century

What annoys me is news reports that middle east unrest (Libya) is driving the oil prices up when we all know its SPECULATORS driving the oil prices up.

Two years ago a large fleet of empty oil tankers were hired to buy up alot of crude to sit on and drive up prices of immediately available pre-refined oil.

The cost of extracting it will go up. The cost of more difficult extraction will cost the environment even more. The cost of putting off finding an alternative will cost even more again.

Thanks to my old VW Type 2 and my current Landrover, I reckon there’s a few years worth soaked into my driveway.

mattbee keep that to yourself mate or you may find your driveway becomes a no fly zone with american and british flags planted in your front garden 😯

Why do you think that the Yanks have suddenly woken up to regime change in Libya seeing as Gaddafi wouldn’t let US oil companies in?

robbo1234biking – Member
Depending on where you read about it up to 100 years at current rate of consumption. Trouble being that the ways to extract it are getting more expensive which causes the price to rise.

plus the rate of consumption is going up.

The ops question is not important really, it’s not how much do we have left but how long until use out strips production.

Why do you think that the Yanks have suddenly woken up to regime change in Libya seeing as Gaddafi wouldn’t let US oil companies in

What? For 2% of the worlds oil?

No its a British/Italian/French led-action otherwise you’d see pictures from Gadaffi of dead women and children from American bombs.

As others have said, there’s loads left but the easily accessible stuff has probably long gone. You can get at the Canadian tar sands, but it’ll require a lot of refining to make it into a useable fuel, which in turn drives up the cost.

Unfortunately, so many politicians on both sides of the pond have links to oil companies that the political will to break with fossil fuel consumption has been muted.

As alluded to by a few others, the really important point isn’t how much is left, but how easy/difficult it is to recover.

We have passed peak oil.

That means that from now on there will be less and less oil available each year. A few (relatively speaking) new deposits are being found but they are mainly low grade or hard to extract, whereas the easy to get at stuff is mainly gone.

In the meantime more and more of the growing population aspire (largely due to our own (western) marketing efforts) to have more and more stuff all of which takes oil to produce/transport.

The argument that economics will take care of everything seems pretty lame to me. There is a question of ERoEI (energy return on energy invested) which essentially means that you need to use more of your oil up getting it to market (a lot more ).

It also means of course that in using oil you are also increasing the amount of CO2 produced for every bit of oil that the end consumer uses, right at a point when that is starting to be frowned upon.

Loads of resources stored here with links to keep you amused endlessly:
http://www.theoildrum.com/

I’d recommend David Strahan’s blog and his book is excellent.
http://www.davidstrahan.com/blog/

I think the ‘oil is running out’ statement really means ‘the oil we can extract at a sensible cost is running out’

There’s loads of the stuff that is too expensive/difficult to exploit with current technology.

This is the crux of the argument to me. The ‘increasing cost of extraction/refinement’argument relies on the assumption that we remain in the current status quo with regards methods, technology, known oil fields etc. In time new methods/technology/knowledge will emerge. Only 30 yrs ago, how economical would sending correspondance to millions of people world wide have been? Today it can be done in an instant at very small cost via the internet. Unfortunately we can never predict what or when incremental progress will happen.

One thing that I am fairly certain of is the cost of oil continually increasing,but this is and will probably always be due to speculation. It suits (and is a plausable argument with the current status quo) the green/environmental movements purpous’ to reinforce the ‘peak oil’,’plundering the planets resources’ arguments.

I work in the Oil Industry and we are definitely seeing a shift albeit slowly to pumping the oil out as opposed to it coming out under pressure. They pump seawater in to push the oil out. Presumably this is for fields that have been in use for some time. No idea how long it will last but I hope it will see me to retirement!

we do alot of work for the oil companies, the north sea stuff is slowly drying up, were refurbing alot of our kit as they are not putting new stuff in because they say theres abotu 10 years left if that.

but theres still loads left in russia (sakhalin) and by all accounts theres a shit load in the arctic but they are years away from engineeirng special drills that wont mess up the eco system, but they will never win the right to actually drill there. (all this is hearsay through contacts of contacts of contacts in work)

Rightplacerighttime… you haven’t studied at CAT have you? There are some very familiar concepts in that post from my time down there 😉

But yep, basically what everyone is saying. We have passed/reached/about to reach peak oil depending on whose figures you want to believe, so it’s a downhill slope from here which should accelerate (Oil production has a bell shape curve which we are somewhere around the top of at the moment, the downturn should, as a result, accelerate pretty damn fast).

Even when we have “run out” of oil there will be a fair bit left, it just won’t be affordable to be used in the way we currently do. This is why we really should be throwing a LOT of resources at alternatives, even if we put the environmental implications of the carbon economy to one side, so that life can continue in something approximating the manner in which we have become used to.

I’m 31, and there’s easily enough left for me to have a career out of it until I retire.

As others have said, there’s loads there that’s never really made it into reserve estimates before as a result of how difficult it is to extract. There’s stuff under the North Sea that is still stuck there cos we can’t figure out a way of getting it out of the ground that’s worthwhile. However, as the price of oil gets ever higher, so the harder-to-get-at oil comes to a point where the extraction expenditure:return ratio becomes financially viable.

@captain K – what were you doing at CAT? I was there a couple of weeks back – awesome place.

This is the crux of the argument to me. The ‘increasing cost of extraction/refinement’argument relies on the assumption that we remain in the current status quo with regards methods, technology, known oil fields etc. In time new methods/technology/knowledge will emerge. Only 30 yrs ago, how economical would sending correspondance to millions of people world wide have been? Today it can be done in an instant at very small cost via the internet. Unfortunately we can never predict what or when incremental progress will happen.

This is missing the point no matter how good technology gets there is only a limited improvements that can be made due to chemistry and physics of extraction.

I would imagine they will have cracked the hydrogen fuel cell by the time oil runs out.
Ormen Lange in Norway has 60 years minimum of gas in just one field, it alone supplies 20% of the UK’s gas consumption.
As for deep water, extraction is getting easier with new technology, look at Perdido in the GOM 3000msw production wells tied back into a Spar with whats called steel catenary risers, 10 years ago this would have been laughed off and considered impossible.
Brazil has an unknown resevoirs, I have read somewhere that Brazil will require something in the region of 120 drilling units, 60 deep water heavy construction vessels, ten deepwater pipe lay vessels and also 10 deepwater intervention vessels and all the other parafanalia that goes with deepwater subsea construction, and thats just to keep up with construction demands over the next 20 years.
So for all thats worried about not being able to thrash your M3/5’s and RS6’s to the local trail centre I think there will be a supply of hydrocarbons for a long time to come yet

limited improvements that can be made due to chemistry and physics of extraction.

At this point in time! 😉 Bell curve analysis is notorious for not taking into account future advancements. Far from missing the point, I understand that peak oil is the best argument we have at present to explain the rising cost of oil.

Do you belive we are at the limits of human understanding?

I read about peak oil a while ago, but not sure if it factored in the burgeoning demand of the developing world.

It won’t be running out anytime soon, but we will get fleeced.

If you think about it, green taxes are just an additional tax for non-environmentally friendly causes.

Lots is technically, but whether or not we can get it out of the ground at an economic price or not remains to be seen.

We will all be living the Good Life in 10 years time…

aP – I work for the number one oil company in the World, Exxonmobil they have been very welcome in Libya especially as they are prepared to spend lots of dosh on Exploration the cost of which they only get back when they discover oil/gas. Believe me all oil comapanies are welcome in Libya especially when Gaddafi can pocket 90% of every $ extracted.

In answer to the OP question, there are lots of reserves in the World, the problem is the means to discover and extract the petrochemials is not yet there to make it viable.

Deepsea drilling is the way ahead.

anokdale – Member

Deepsea drilling is the way ahead.

I am sure that the residents of the Gulf of Mexico would whole-heartedly agree with you on that point 😉

Do you belive we are at the limits of human understanding?

no one thinks this but I dont see how this supports your suggesstion that something cheap and easy to use will be dicovered or invented that will somehow make oil extraction as cheap and affordable as spaming everyone on the Internet. i may as well say we will run cars from water, split the atom easily/cheaply, control fusion and power things from and un yet discovered technology that will be free and plentiful. The future not being predictable is a given and no matter how outlandish the claims we cant disprove them.
You have no proof of this claim [nor can i disprove it] so it is pointless to debate it but I lack your faith.

Ho hum – Your right but as America is the largest consumer of oil the said residents dont really matter in the big pcture.

The blocks in Libya offshore well the ones that are producing in the Sirte basin are all deep water and that is the way ahead if we want to keep pumping petrol into our cars.