Wednesday, March 05, 2008

Are We Running Out of Oil?

It's common wisdom that we're running out oil. But when? At what rate?

Check out this article, "The World Has Plenty of Oil" for some insights into current known resources, extraction efficiencies, consumption rates, and timelines.

"The world is not running out of oil anytime soon. A gradual transitioning on the global scale away from a fossil-based energy system may in fact happen during the 21st century. The root causes, however, will most likely have less to do with lack of supplies and far more with superior alternatives. The overused observation that "the Stone Age did not end due to a lack of stones" may in fact find its match.
The solutions to global energy needs require an intelligent integration of environmental, geopolitical and technical perspectives each with its own subsets of complexity. On one of these -- the oil supply component -- the news is positive. Sufficient liquid crude supplies do exist to sustain production rates at or near 100 million barrels per day almost to the end of this century."

You can find corroboration about oil supplies and consumption in this wikipedia article.

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