How Much Oil is Left on Earth?
by: GARRETT HEANEY
“How much oil is actually left?” That is, “How much much longer will it be possible for our culture to depend on oil and other fossil fuels for energy?”
I found a couple answers. The first came from the article, How Much Oil is Actually Left On This Planet? Should We Care? by Nick Chambers. In this article, the answer actually comes from Dr. Peter McCabe, a geologist who has put in decades of research related to fossil fuels. Currently he is a Theme Leader with CSIRO Petroleum in Australia.
McCabe suggests that we still have 30 years worth of fossil fuels — and that “fossil fuels will dominate our energy mix for at least the next few decades — and we should just accept it.”
Chambers says of McCabe’s prediction:
“The way he sees it, the world has plenty of remaining and untapped fossil fuel resources to keep up with demand for at least the next 30 years. From squeezing oil out of unconventional sources such as oil shales, to using new technologies to re-exploit old oil fields that had since been left as dead, to undiscovered conventional oil sources, Dr. McCabe’s opinion is that there is no impending peak oil crisis — and the same thing goes for natural gas and coal.”
McCabe (and Chamber’s) tone is hilarious to me. Given the fact that mankind has been on Earth for 10,000 years, 30 years is nothing — a blink of the eye when we zoom out the time scale a bit. Should we find some kind of comfort in the theory that we still have 30 years worth of oil left? It is alarming — to me — that we’ve gotten this close, and have done so little to adapt to more sustainable technologies.
Upon further research, I found a transcript of a speech by David Goodstein. David Goodstein is the Caltech vice provost and a professor of applied physics there. He is the author of Out of Gas: The End of the Age of Oil.
In this speech, Goodstein poses that we’ll most likely see the peak of oil within the next couple years. I found this speech to be the most reliable and informative resource on the issue, and have collected some valuable excerpts below:
“One such estimate was published in 1998 in Scientific American. It predicts that we will have a worldwide maximum in oil production just about now—around the middle of the decade 2000–2010. What will happen when we reach that peak we don’t really know. But we had a foretaste in 1973 and ’79 when the OPEC countries took advantage of the supply shortage in the United States and shut down the valve a bit. What happened, as you may recall, is that we had instant panic and despair for the future of our way of life, and mile-long lines at gas stations.
We don’t know what’s going to happen at the next peak, but we do know that those past peaks were artificial and temporary. The next one will not be artificial and it will not be temporary.”
“In 1997, Kenneth Deffeyes, a former Shell Oil geologist who’s now an emeritus professor of geosciences at Princeton, published a book he entitled Hubbert’s Peak—The Impending World Oil Shortage. In it, Deffeyes said he knew that Hubbert had been right and that the peak for domestic production had been reached when he saw this sentence in 1971 in the San Francisco Chronicle: “The Texas Railroad Commission announced a 100% allowable for next month.”
To demystify that sentence, the Texas Railroad Commission was the quaintly named cartel that controlled the U.S. oil industry by making strategic use of the excess capacity for pumping in Texas. When the commission said, “100% allowable for next month,” it meant that there was no longer any excess capacity. They were pumping flat-out, and therefore Hubbert’s Peak had been reached.
Ever since reading this, I’ve thought that the signal that the worldwide peak had been reached would be when we found out that Saudi Arabian production had peaked. For the last few decades, the Saudis have been using excess pumping capacity to manipulate the world oil market in exactly the same way the Texans once did.
Well, on February 24 of this year, a story appeared on the front page of the New York Times entitled “Forecast of Rising Oil Demand Challenges Tired Saudi Fields.” Among other things, the article said that Saudi Arabia’s oil fields are in decline, prompting industry and government officials to raise serious questions about whether the kingdom will be able to satisfy the world’s thirst for oil in the coming years.
This is a New York Times story, so it’s very long, as many Times stories are, and it’s written in a style in which each successive paragraph is contradicted by the next paragraph. This is called “balanced reporting.” Sure enough, much farther down in the article, we find these words: “Some economists are optimistic that if oil prices rise high enough, advanced recovery techniques will be applied, averting supply problems.” But here comes the contradiction in the next paragraph, “But, privately, some Saudi oil officials are less sanguine.”
I don’t know whether we will look back years from now and say that this was the beginning of the end of the age of oil. We’re much too close to it to tell, and our figures are, overall, much too uncertain. But, to those people who are aware of the Hubbert’s Peak predictions, as the writer of this article apparently was not, this was a chilling report.
Economists tell us that there can never be a gap between supply and demand because the process is regulated by price. That’s never been true in the case of oil, because it has always been controlled by cartels, first in Texas and later by OPEC. However, once the peak occurs, OPEC will lose control of the situation, and the price mechanism will kick in with a vengeance. But the supply can keep up with the price only if there is something to supply.
“So, what does the future hold? Well, for one thing, there will be an oil crisis very soon. Whether that means it has already begun or won’t happen until later in this decade or sometime in the next decade, I don’t know. In my view, the numbers are not dependable enough for us to say. However, while the difference between those estimates may be very important to us, it’s of no importance at all on the timescale of human history. Either we, our children, or perhaps our grandchildren, are in for some very, very bad times. If we turn to all the other fossil fuels and burn them up as fast as we can, they will all probably start to run out by the end of the 21st century. Assuming that our planet remains habitable after such a vast consumption binge, we will have to invent a way to live without fossil fuels.”
“As things stand today, the only possible substitutes for our fossil-fuel dependency are light from the sun and nuclear energy. Developing a way of running a civilization like ours on those resources is an enormous challenge. A great deal of it is social and political—we’re in the midst of a presidential election, and have you heard either party say a word about this extremely important subject? But there are also huge technical problems to be solved.” •
