CibbuanoThe End of Oil
November 27th 2007 18:53
While car manufacturers are chuckling and encouraging us to maintain our 3-car-per-home habit, some analysts are getting increasingly testy about what could be the end of oil, as outlined in this Wired post.
It's a story published in the Wall Street Journal, and it's almost doomsday style fear.
I can't read the story since I'm not a fancy-pantsy 'subscriber', so I won't help the WSJ and link to them. Let them choke on the inflated price of their subscriptions.
I won't bother quoting them either.
I will paraphrase them, though... basically, they predict that the ceiling on oil production is about 100 million barrels a day - and we're already at 85 million barrels a day. After that, we're maxed out... which means if the demand for oil increases, with affluence spreading to the huge populations in China and India, it'll become an increasingly scare resource.
From the Wired post:
"There's still a lot of oil left to be pumped. But there is a growing belief that several factors are converging to create a practical limit to how much we can pull from the earth each day."
And with the oil fields running dry:
So, we just rely on alternative fuels, right?
It's not that simple... while local governments may be able to push solar power or wind power, reorienting an entire nation towards an alternative fuel requires a massive infrastructure investment.
Can we do it? It's all up in the air, but as my flatmate said, looking over my shoulder as I wrote this: 'we're all fucked'.
It's a story published in the Wall Street Journal, and it's almost doomsday style fear.
I can't read the story since I'm not a fancy-pantsy 'subscriber', so I won't help the WSJ and link to them. Let them choke on the inflated price of their subscriptions.
I won't bother quoting them either.
I will paraphrase them, though... basically, they predict that the ceiling on oil production is about 100 million barrels a day - and we're already at 85 million barrels a day. After that, we're maxed out... which means if the demand for oil increases, with affluence spreading to the huge populations in China and India, it'll become an increasingly scare resource.
From the Wired post:
"There's still a lot of oil left to be pumped. But there is a growing belief that several factors are converging to create a practical limit to how much we can pull from the earth each day."
And with the oil fields running dry:
"Most of the world's biggest oil fields are aging, and their production is falling. There is widespread speculation that the Ghawar oil field in Saudi Arabia, the world's largest, is petering out, which is significant because it likely has produced more than half the oil that has flowed out of the kingdom. At the rate oil fields are being depleted, simply maintaining our current production of 85 million barrels a day will require producing at least another 4 million daily barrels every year."
It's not that simple... while local governments may be able to push solar power or wind power, reorienting an entire nation towards an alternative fuel requires a massive infrastructure investment.
Can we do it? It's all up in the air, but as my flatmate said, looking over my shoulder as I wrote this: 'we're all fucked'.
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