I haven’t found an adequate answer for this question on the net (just a lot of silliness and/or propaganda) so I’ve had to do the sums myself. Current world consumption is about 26 billion barrels per year. World Oil Consumption has been falling for the last two years but I think an average growth rate of 1.5% - 2% per year seems reasonable based on the expected continuing industrialisation of China, India and the Third World. That means that world oil consumption will have doubled to about 50 billion barrels per year in around 2045 when oil consumption may level off due to energy conservation measures and plateauing populations and industrialisation. There is - approximately - (no one really knows for sure) 1.3 trillion barrels of proven oil reserves across the world. If we use, say, 1 trillion barrels over the next 34 years that will leave us with only 300 billion barrels when world oil consumption hopefully(!) levels off at 50 billion barrels a year in 2045. That means that post 2045 there will only be a six years supply left. By this metric all the oil in the world will run out in 2051....
However, there are many unexplored regions of the world and it wouldn’t be outrageous (but it would generous) to suggest that there could be another 1 trillion barrels of oil in the Arctic, in the Antarctic, off Greenland, in Russia and in other inhospitable regions. But one trillion only buys us another twenty years or so at the 50 billion per year consumption rate so the oil runs out in 2071 (and thats assuming a levelling off of oil consumption after 2045). But what about the Bakken formation in N. Dakota and the oil sands of Alberta and Venezuela as well as other places around the globe? Well now we’re talking big numbers. At the moment most of those massive deposits are uneconomic but if we’re running out of oil fast then by golly they will quickly become economic. In Canada and Venezuela alone there could be as much as 4 trillion barrels of oil that may be recoverable with advanced technologies. This will buy us another 80 years. Let’s throw in the remaining world oil sands fields for good measure and that brings us up to an even 100 years.
...
So when does all the oil run out? Add this all together and I reckon the answer is August 6th 2171 at 7.15 pm British Summer Time. If no one’s invented a fusion reactor by then it’ll be back to the glorious days of clipper ships and steam trains. Hurrah!
...
(And please don’t get me started on the topic of world coal reserves).
52 comments:
I welcome your comments but dont even think about faulting my maths. I taught maths to the sixth grade for a terrifying two terms and I still have the nightmares to prove it.
I think cars running on hydrogen will take off soon, though sadly not literally. (What happened to the promised hover cars!?) Maybe that will eke out the oil reserves a bi further.
Mike
I like the idea of Hydrogen cars, but to make the H we're going to need a lot of nuclear power or something, right?
I'm riding my bike!
Interesting and timely. I'm researching Peak Oil as a possible backdrop for a new book. What's particularly scary is that most people in the business seem to agree that the estimated oil reserves are very likely exaggerated. Possibly vastly so. In which case, your prediction is almost certainly on the generous side.
Re nuclear power. Someone very smart calculated that if we used nuclear energy instead of oil at our current rate of consumption, the world's uranium supply would be depleted in ten years. I read that somewhere so it must be true.
Speedskater
Smart move. Even a motorbike...I used to get over 100 MPG on my Kawasaki 125.
Al
But then again there are vast areas of the Earth which are completely unexplored. Basically all we've looked into are the easy places - the non ice covered land masses and the continental shelves.
But still I'm not fussy, I'll give you + or - 150 years on the prediction if you want.
My brother-in-law retired a couple of years ago and then became fairly obsessed with peak oil. Not the retirement hobby I'm looking forward to, but it keeps him busy.
John
I wont be worried about that in my retirement. I'll be living off the grid by then in the forests of northern Maine bow hunting elk and moose and hand printing my anti government tracts.
Ha, yeah, why is it everyone living off the grid feels this need to tell everyone else what's really going on. You'd think they'd want to be quiet about it.
I guess it's like every conspiracy theorist, it's very important to them that everyone else knows "the truth," too.
At least with peak oil it's easy to see how they're trying to affect policy and what they're trying to get out of it.
John
Wait a minute, you thought I was kidding?
I... am going to be so dead. :/ I miss everything.
Running out of oil is a good thing, as long as we see it coming.
Maine might not be a bad place to live off the grid. Have you read Stephen King's Cell?
I think you need to look at what places were like before there was a grid (or oil).
Actually this is my theory as to why the further west we get in North America the more people freak out at the idea of the end of oil - those cities were built after cars had become common and they don't seem to be able to imagine that a city with a million people once functioned just fine without cars.
Katy
Yup we'll be toast. Or dust. Or dusty toast.
Dennis
True. I think we'll figure it out. Humans are pretty good at figuring things out. Look at the Rubiks cube.
John
Yeah I read somewhere that it takes longer to get across London now than it did 100 years ago pre car. One of the reasons I like reading Sherlock Holmes stories are all the bits where he and Watson pop down to say Portsmouth and back on the train and arrive in time for the SECOND, AFTERNOON post.
Which do you figure the U.S. will invade first, Canada or Venezuela? I kind of hope the latter, since I'd hate to be detained under the New Patriot Act and sent to Permanent Installation Guantanamo.
Peter
The smart play would be to undermine the country for several decades first. If I were the CIA I'd do all I could to encourage Quebec nationalism and the Canadian Green Party. With Quebec gone the maritimes would be bifurcated like Bangladesh and ferment could be stirred up there too.
I reckon you could start a secessionist movement in British Columbia and Alberta, esp if the Greens in Ontario became powerful and remained opposed to the despoilation of nature that exploiting the oil sands would entail.
BC and Alberta secede and become a very very rich US protectorate with no income taxes, a la Dubai...
You do it smart enough and you play the long game and no blood needs to be spilled.
So the Bloc Quebecois' failure in the recent federal election, which would seem to contradict your scenario, really supports it -- Quebec gets disgusted with confederation.
The cleverly engineered defeat of the internationalist Michael Ignatieff and curiously strong triumph of the Albertan Stephen Harper -- well, it's obvious, isn't it?
==========================
Detectives Beyond Borders
"Because Murder Is More Fun Away From Home"
http://www.detectivesbeyondborders.blogspot.com/
Peter
The long game means you're looking beyond this and the next four or five elections. You keep the Quebec nationalists down for a decade or two and then they rise up from the ashes and liberate the country from the forces of modernism, the nanny state, the food police, US control of hockey and general anglophone tyranny. The first President of the Quebec Republic is probably only in primary school at the moment.
OK, the title is The Long Game/Le jeu longue. No, a better title: The Game Is Long.
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Detectives Beyond Borders
"Because Murder Is More Fun Away From Home"
http://www.detectivesbeyondborders.blogspot.com/
Peter
But how do you turn 40 years of incremental decision making into a thriller? Or do you just do it as an Arthur C Clarke novel - the big idea is all and the characters dont really matter?
"Jean-Baptiste Laliberte watched the smoke from his Diplomatico drift out over the Straits of Florida. ... "
Quebec's first president, 102 years old and comfortably retired, looks back on the events that brought him to his U.S.-government villa in the Florida Keys (even bigger than Derek Jeter's).
==========================
Detectives Beyond Borders
"Because Murder Is More Fun Away From Home"
http://www.detectivesbeyondborders.blogspot.com/
It's probably going to be a multi-volume saga like Orson Scott Card. Or Genesis.
I was really hoping someone was going to challange you on the math. Every once in awhile this discussion group I go to gets someone in and they go on about peak oil, oil tars etc., etc. It's not that I'm not interested at the time. It's just that I can't remember a single detail about it after.
Who in the U.S. has the attention span to play the long game I'm wondering.
This was very good a few weeks ago:
I'm a Climate Scientist
In other news, all of that stress over creative writing I had has paid off as I've just been accepted on to a post-grad teaching course!
Congratulations, Rob! Whereabouts?
Have you guys read William Weintrab's, "The Underdogs"? Had some very funny stuff about an independent Quebec including turning the Sun Life building into an urban farm.
There's also some funny stuff in it about porridge.
The sooner we run out of oil, the sooner someone will be moved to devise an alternative source of energy. And then someone can devise a method of propulsion slightly less ludicrous than the internal combustion engine. Imagine explaining it to an alien visitor: "Well, basically, um, you light a fire in the front bit." A Maybach Landaulet costs $1.35m but it moves only because you light a fire in the front bit.
Btw Adrian, what odds the Villa spoiling King Kenny's end to the season? Ville might be excremental but Spurs have got Birmingham and, happily, they're worse.
Peter
I like it, but judging from the number of Quebecois I found in Havana I imagine he's looking at the Florida Strait from the southern side.
Seana
What I get from the numbers is that it seems that there's no need to panic for a while yet anyway.
Rob
Congratulations. Somewhere in Brisbane?
David
I dont care. We've lost the battle but I feel we've won the war. This is the first time I've been happy about goings on at Anfield in four years.
John
That sounds good. I'd go further, a militant aggressive Quebec invades and annexes Greenland...
But will Cuba be more hospitable to The Republic of Quebec? To the American territories of Alberta and British Columbia? To the rump state of Canada?
(Incidentally, calling a Quebecois Jean-Baptiste Laliberte is something like calling an Irishman Paddy O'Reilly -- a bit on the stereotypical side.)
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Detectives Beyond Borders
"Because Murder Is More Fun Away From Home"
http://www.detectivesbeyondborders.blogspot.com/
Peter
Cuba will be the only place safe from De Gaulle Zombie Clone army...
The second word of that army's name, its first letter in particular, will resonate in the book.
As part of Alberta's one-nation, two-systems status in the North American Confederation of America, elementary schools there will be allowed to continue teaching that the last letter of the alphabet is zed.
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Detectives Beyond Borders
"Because Murder Is More Fun Away From Home"
http://www.detectivesbeyondborders.blogspot.com/
We south of the border Americans won't stand for that zed, Peter. Them's fighting words. Our invasion by steam engine and balloon may take awhile, but we will prevail.
Seana, a cabal of radical revanchist underground Canadian Canadians, as opposed to the accomodationist American Canadians and the moderate nationalist Canadian Americans, will insist on blowing up institutions whose publications spell "colour" without the "u."
Saying "mom" instead of "mum" could earn you a slit throat in some of the shadier, holdout areas of Victoria, province of American British Columbia.
==========================
Detectives Beyond Borders
"Because Murder Is More Fun Away From Home"
http://www.detectivesbeyondborders.blogspot.com/
I think we'll be safe, as long as we don't write anything down. Maybe the laconic "Ma" will allow the Yanks to get by.
Or maybe not.
Whatever. We're coming after those tar sands, mis amies.
Canada from eh to zed!
Yankee go home!
(The national anthem of the breakaway Canadian Republic of American British Columbia can be the Guess Who's "American Woman." Remember some of its lines? The Department of Homeland Security would probably bar the band from touring in the U.S. these days.)
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Detectives Beyond Borders
"Because Murder Is More Fun Away From Home"
http://www.detectivesbeyondborders.blogspot.com/
It's certainly an improvement and Suarez will only improve. I'm feeling vaguely guilty that Houllier's heart hiccup made me feel so cheerful. Vaguely.
Peter, Seana
In older books you still could see "mum" and "mummy" from American writers. I cant think of any examples right now, but I'm pretty sure I remember that.
David
And I know we're all supposed to pull together or something but I will be rooting for Barca.
Thank you to Ger Brennan for a very nice piece on Falling Glass in Culture Northern Ireland and an interview on the same page.
Nice review from gb.
Yeah, I've heard particularly mummy, but it usually is supposed to represent some person in the privileged classes.
Catching some zeds will never replace catching some zees.
Take this to the bank.
In 2045 we will all(in my case my corpse)be driving electric cars. The electricity will be created at nuclear fission plants. We will have spent money advancing the science so it's safer. Battery technology will be advanced. We will have spent money on technology to make the waste storage cheaper and safer. It's right there in front of us and I believe that logic will prevail.
Seana
I may have caught it from 1930s films.
Lew
I think that'll be the case, but I bet petrol engine cars stick around right until the end of the century.
Sunshine Coast which is handily where I live.
I once directed a student film based on a Leonard Cohen novel about Quebecois terrorists. I only had a day's notice and was restricted to studio filming only.
I'm still unsure as to what it was about. There was an indigenous Canadian princess who lived 200 years ago and somehow she was leading the Quebecois separatist movement in the 60s.
There was also a naked woman painted red, a man with a large prosthetic penis which he used as a bookmark before using a remote controlled car covered in dildos to rape someone.
This is silly to think about since Canadian tar sands, and oil off in Russia, Greenland and the Antarctic are all a big waste anyways. We can't put wells on moving polar ice caps. We can't put money into Canadian tar sands and ethanol when we're getting a negative net profit out of it because it takes oil just to make those alternative fuels! We as a civilization have to stray away from fossil fuels in the first place because oil is going to run much quicker than most expect because all plastics, metals, and rubbers are made from oil. We can't just consider transportation as the only source oil is used.
what?!?! that's mean i have to wit 161 years in till oil ends i wnated to live that moment i thought it was in 10 yers
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