What's the deal of the world reaching peak oil? Are we truly reaching a point to where we are unable to meet oil demand?

Despite the fact that demand for oil has exceeded supply during approximately one-half of the past 38 years, the shortages have not been extreme – the largest being approximately 1.5 billion barrels in 1982. Market forces always seem to be at work to solve the imbalances…. I would hope the by the time oil is at an extreme price per barrell technology will have created better, more effective alternatives.

It appears that light sweet crude has already peaked, and production is bigger than ever which means that more and more production is sour crude. This crude is harder to refine, which is a problem since many refineries are not equipped to refine it, and needs to upgrade in order to do so. The low number of available refineries equipped and the cost of rebuilding them, seems to be a big reason for the rise in fuel prices.

I am not sure if it can be accurately estimated how much oil we have, as technology develop which help exploit more oil from existent oil fields as well as discovering new sources; the Brazilian deep-sea oil found recently as well as the massive potential Greenland oil reserves. The Athabasca oil sands in Alberta is a also a massive source of oil; extraction of this heavy sour comes with devastating environmental impact.

With demand only rising in the whole world – notably from China and India – it seems hard to judge when total peak oil will happen.

There is a Russian alternative theory of the creation of oil that contradicts the theory of fossil oil being the one and only. They mean that there are huge amounts of abiogenic petroleum deposits deep in the earth, created at the time of formation of the planet, and that this oil seeps up and replenishes surface oil sources. Few support this theory, but it resurfaces regularly. It’s possible, but doesn’t seem likely.

I am not sure if anyone knows if we will have oil for 30 years or 100 years. We will probably only know of total peak oil when it plateaus and declines. Everything else seems to be educated guesses.

Hopefully someone else will give you a clearer answer.

Currently, there is a backlog of oil. Prices are rising because investors have shifted to crude oil again.

Prices are rising because oil companies are only putting out enough oil to keep up demand. They have way more than enough oil, in fact the only “sometimes” bottleneck is turning crude into useable products (not enough refineries). Oil companies will increase output when prices reach ridiculous levels and the public complains, but not until.

Actually that’s the thing that’s ironic about the whole “Drill here drill now” thing that the Republicans ran on in 08. The oil companies already have millions of acres of land that’s supposedly rich with oil on our soil/shores that they’re allowed to drill on. They won’t build on the sites though, because they did the math and found it would be more profitable for them to limit their production and simply charge more for the oil.

And the oil peak is a moot point. Everytime we reach a crisis we finally get off our butts and do the research/design necessary to make cars/machines/technology that is more efficient with it’s oil use. Cars go through MAJOR increases in fuel efficiency everytime there’s an oil crisis. Back in the 70’s, 15 mpg on a car was AMAZING fuel economy. Now, 25 is avg at best.

A new crude oil supply has just been discovered off the coast of South America. this should last you and i and the rest of us, till we see the white light. we need a replacement form of energy for gasoline. battery-powered automobiles is not the answer. man is in love with the gasoline engine.

Oil say so~

That is a good point guys. It seems like whenever we truly reach an energy crunch, we miraculously start building these amazing inventions out of our butts that could really revolutionize the way we do business. The problem is when gas prices go back down to affordable levels, we just put all this great technology aside because the demand drops to a point that is not profitable for anyone. I saw this car that was able to go 100MPG and drive 700 miles without a fill up. Where is it now??? on someone’s scrap board. I WANT THESE AMAZING INVENTIONS! People seem to have a short memory on crisis’s. The energy crisis of the 70’s should be a wake up call that we need to shift away from these finite resources and get some of these wondrous machines up and running that will give us a bright, environmentally clean future

@oratio that was a great answer too! I really didn’t know the difference between light sweet crude, and the other stuff.

We don’t just automatically have technological revolutions every time there’s a crisis. People work to make those changes. A lot of that work has to be done before the crisis, or it would take too long to make changes. We all have the people who worry about running out of oil and advocate change to prepare for it for the fact that we have met previous crises. There’s nothing automatic about it. The fact that we’ve gotten by so far doesn’t mean we don’t need to work on efficiency and alternative energy. It is this work that enables us to handle shortages.

As for peak oil, all you need to know is that the supply of oil is finite. The supply of people who want cars is not. If China’s growth continues as it has, then you can count on running out of oil, at least the point of prices that make it impossible for the average American to fuel a car using current technology, in our lifetimes.

Even if we don’t run out, it becomes more and more expensive and requires a large and large energy input to get the oil (and coal for that matter) out of the ground and into a usable form. Very soon we will be burning coal to produce the energy to convert oil shale to oil and the energy input will be greater than the energy output. Seems like just running our cars on electricity will be more efficient. But we don’t get there by just waiting around and assuming somebody will fix everything when we get to a crisis. We get there by people seeing the crisis in advance and working to implement the new technology now. That’s how we’ve done it in the past.

@Snarp Well the problem is that those people who have all those great things can’t seem to get the funding they need to really get these wonderful inventions off the ground. Though 4 dollar gas really motivated investors to put their money into alternative energies during our most recent crisis. It just seems that now, they don’t really care that we may be running out of oil because gas prices are down, and the media is silent about the storm on the horizon.

We stopped refining (building new refineries) here in the states.
So when demand increases our refineries go into over time/over drive. Where supply and demand should mean cheaper gas and oil prices.
We pay for that for that “overtime” offset.

This is an interesting question and there is no known one answer. There are known reserves and unknown reserves and often politics plays into how much is revealed. For example the known reserves of Saudi Arabia seem to go up exponentially where they are not overseen by strict Western accounting. We know about 50% of the known reserves are in the Middle East but Canada as a single nation has as much as any one nation on earth as far as reserve to production which is estimated at 150 years.

The problem is that as other reserves dry up even more demand will be placed on Saudi Arabia, Iran and Canada changing these estimates. Some estimates say as early as the second to third quarter of this century. I agree with this estimation because of the insatiable need from Asia and the rise of the Third World. I also think that during this century demand will be fierce and supply will be scarce and wars will flare up over existing reserves. The problem with fossil fuels is the amount of industry that is dependent upon them. Major industry shifts, massive infrastructure changes will have to be started if we are to make the transition to alternative fuels. Oil is the power of almost every industry.

@SeventhSense As I understand it, Canada’s reserves are mostly in tar sands and oil shale, sources that are very energy intensive and environmentally destructive to mine and to convert to usable oil. Are these huge Canadian reserves you are talking about crude oil or tar sands and oil shale?

@Snarp
I’m citing known reserves which include the sources you mentioned I’m sure but in the US we still import twice as much crude oil from Canada as any other individual country. As we develop more efficient means to extract the more difficult such as the oil sands, we will no doubt have a strong control over their distribution and subsequent refinement.

You think the oil crunch is bad, wait until we face the world-wide water shortage!

@Yetanotheruser You ain’t just whistling Dixie.

@Yetanotheruser
We’ll be lassoing the drifting icebergs and manning them with warships.

@SeventhSense That is if we can get to them before they melt!

I’m glad you asked this. On a recent “Charlie Rose” the guy who is sometimes referred to as the “Arab Warren Buffet” and is a member of the Saudi Royal family said we have 100–120 years worth at today’s consumption rates.

@kevbo Well there’s an unbiased source. Of course, consumption is highly unlikely to stay at todays rates. 1.3 billion Chinese people who want to live like Americans and a Chinese government that has been pushing car ownership to replace bicycles are bound to change things.

I think it’s bullshit being promulgated by the people who want to drill in the arctic and develop the Green River oil shale. I saw an article in Popular Mechanics not long ago about how much untapped oil there is in the world, and it’s staggering. A lot of it is in unstable parts of Africa or far offshore, but it’s there.

@Snarp You can add 1.2 billion Indians to that. There is a lot of talk about China. India is behind, but is the worlds seconds-fastest growing market. What is true for China is true for India. Both struggle for more oil.

You should check out the movie The Collapse

http://www.collapsemovie.com/

Talks all about the Oil Biz

@oratio True enough.

Thats defiantly an issue is the population boom and the level of developing countries that wants to live like we live. I heard that if we were to have a 5% short fall between supply and demand that it could cause severe repercussions across the world economy. Do you guys think there is anything as energy abundant and available as crude oil? Could it be replaced to supplement our vast industries?

@NerdRageIT Thank you for that information! I will check it out

@Tenpinmaster Well the easy, dirty answer is coal. It’s as available and abundant as oil, it’s just not as portable. For sheer abundance you can’t beat solar, and panel efficiencies continue to rise, which will make it more and more cost effective. More sophisticated solar systems like power towers could already be highly effective as powerplants in the right locations, the problem is maintaining supply 24 hours. Storage is the key.

You can have massive “proven reserves” and still run into Peak Oil because it is inherently a production-rate effect. We’ll never really run out of oil completely, but the reserves are always going deeper or farther off-shore or finding more inaccessible places. We are exhausting the huge shallow fields that gushered as soon as they were drilled into. More and more we’ll have to struggle harder to extract oil, which will limit production rate.

Only time will tell when global production rate peaked.

We’ll never really run out of oil completely? Say what?

It is true that at the current and projected future use, some day there will be no more oil to process. However, whether we reach that day before the people of the earth run out of some other necessary resource, such as potable water is unknown.

@YARNLADY
Yes and at one point if it takes us 20 years to get to the last drops it’s hardly feasible nor worthy of the cost to extract.

The closer we get to peak, the more reliance we will make on alternative energy sources, and so demand for oil drops, and peak moves away a little again. I think we will always get closer and closer to peak but probably not reach it as quickly as we might think.

@SeventhSense The end state predicted by the theory will have the remaining reserves so difficult to exploit that obtaining a unit of oil from them will require more energy (pumping up from great depth, separation from sand/shale) than burning that unit would generate. Oil as a fossil fuel will not make any economic sense at that point (though almost certainly it will be eclipsed by something else before then).

@hiphiphopflipflapflop
Okay, I understand. You’re being literal.