LUBBOCK, Texas — Oil is a nonrenewable resource. Whatever we burn today for use as energy will be unavailable for future generations.
Though this is a fact, it has the tendency to spawn catastrophic predictions based on fear rather than factual evidence. For more than 150 years there has been a steady stream of scientists claiming our oil supply is running out, and we have only a few years left. The world will in actuality never run completely out of oil; the problem is people believe it will.
The rising anxiety concerning high gas prices has caused a shift in public priorities about the importance of exploring new energy — 52 percent of Americans favor giving tax cuts to energy companies to explore for more oil, according to the Pew Research Center.
The history of oil is really quite surprising and serves as the ultimate distinction for the grassroots of this problem and its future. Before 1859, when the very first oil well was drilled in Pennsylvania, our petroleum supplies were limited to the masses of crude oil that oozed to the surface.
Four years earlier, in 1855, an advertisement for Kier’s Rock Oil advised consumers to “…hurry, before this wonderful product is depleted from Nature’s laboratory.” Even more astonishing, in 1874, a geologist in Pennsylvania declared the United States only had four years left before it ran out of enough oil for kerosene lamps.
Predictions about oil supplies running out have plagued the United States for more than 150 years. The history of these radical predictions is evidently quite vast; most of the harbingers who influence the masses ignore the history of reserves and production coupled with technology.
In the 1920’s, the U.S. Geological Survey announced that worldwide, only 60 billion barrels of oil existed. Thirty years later, the estimation was 10 times that: 600 billion barrels of oil. In 1980, the estimation was increased again to 2 trillion, 2,000 billion barrels of oil, altogether meeting today’s estimation of 3 trillion barrels.
Predicting when the world will run out of oil is impossible. It is impossible to calculate the continued expansion of energy corporations, changing economics, technological advances and efforts such as recycling and substitution that make the world’s mineral resources virtually infinite.
Cost is ever-changing with today’s advances in the oil industry, and we are able to drill faster, easier and more cost-effectively. David Deming, professor of geophysics at the University of Oklahoma, offers logical insight into the oil industry.
“Oil reserves are analogous to food stocks in a pantry,” he said. “If a household divides its pantry stores by the daily food-consumption rate, the same conclusion always is reached: The family will starve to death in a few weeks.”
It is not possible to calculate when the world’s oil supply will run dry exactly because of this: Reserves are constantly in motion along with technology and the market. The world oil production steadily has been increasing since the early 1900’s.
As such, the price of gasoline today is significantly cheaper than the previous 150 years — if inflation is accounted for.
More interesting, however, is the fact that estimates of the world’s oil have increased more rapidly than our production. As mentioned before, this is possible because of new technology and market prices, which whenever scarcity is suggested, rapidly employ new exploration and development. Running out of oil? We are running straight into it.
Many believe an economy built on oil is not sustainable. While it is true, an economy built on oil in the long run is not sustainable, sustainability is extremely misleading. No technology since the dawn of our existence has been sustainable; all of it has been replaced by newer and more efficient technology.
Sources of energy have stemmed from a varying degree of sources, from wood, to coal and now oil. Oil is the “newest” source, only taking its place as chief source of energy in the early 1960’s.
Surprisingly, while oil remains our chief source of energy, it is constantly attacked by extremely tight environmental restrictions and opposition from local communities. In fact, the number and capacity of U.S. refineries peaked in 1981. In 1981, there were 324 oil refineries; today there are only 150.
How long will oil last? Predicting the future on our current reserves is impossible. At the moment, the world has enough reserves to last another 100 years. Yet, 100 years into the future is so far, it would be asinine to attempt to predict what our descendants will be using as energy.
All of the current estimations for oil do not include unconventional oil resources. The tar sands in Canada and South America would add about 600 billion barrels to the world’s supply. Colorado, Utah and Wyoming alone contain 1.5 trillion barrels of oil. Worldwide, the oil-shale reserves could be as large as 14 trillion barrels — more than 500 years of oil supply at year 2000 production rates.