Running out of Oil

Several media stories over the past few years have discussed the possibility of us running out of commercially useable Oil within the next few years. How accurate is this? This blog post is going to be quite a long one, critically evaluating both sides of the argument, and explaining it from geoscientists point of view.

So who says we are?

A quick google search of “running out of oil” brings up over 29 million hits relating to the topic, and the top two are articles are from the independent, with their headlines being;

“Warning, Oil supplies are running out fast”

From the independent 03.08.2009

“World oil supplies are set to run out faster than expected, warn scientists”

From the independent 14.06.2007

The general theme of both of these articles is that the world’s major oil fields have passed their peak production rate and from here on out the amount of oil we have commercially available to us will decrease rapidly.

Much of the quoted evidence comes from scientists at the “Oil Depletion Analysis Centre” Based in London. These scientists are criticising any and all “official government statistics”. Using language such as “world will run dry” this organisation seems to be deliberately trying to scare people into finding alternative sources of energy, but are the scare tactics necessary? And one other thing, most of those that are coming up with dates and statistics are not geologists they are economists who seem to have no clue about what is going on inside the Earth!

The Geological Perspective and what can be done

Well from a geological point of view, we are never going to run out of oil. It will always be produced within the Earth; we might just need to wait a few million years for it to mature. Oh and that’s not including all of the unexplored regions and untapped reserves we haven’t found yet. But yes we may be using too much crude oil, and we may need to cut back a bit on what we use it on in order to ensure there is enough to go around for what we really need, and while we’re at it we should start to recycle out plastics a bit more. Crude Oil is used to make plastic and we have no alternative for it, so that’s one way of saving our oil. And how about cars? Maybe we should all switch to electric cars, that’d save us a lot. And renewable energy that’d help too.

Yes all of these alternatives seem expensive at the moment but in the long run they are a great investment. More emphasis needs to be put on educating the public for a better tomorrow, not only for the sake of our resources, but also because renewable energies are better for our planet and we all know that we’re causing some pretty nasty climate change. This’d be a great way to slow that down. So we’d kill two birds with one stone. Happy Days.

GF