Doug’s Mouthpiece – Droug.co.uk

Peak oil – when we start to run out of oil

Politics written by Doug Scott

Did you know we have found hardly any oil since the 1970’s – how much is left? The major oil fields are listed here . The “new” oil that has been found is mostly is difficult to recover, the old oil fields are getting harder to recover what has not been already removed.

So basically for over 20 years we have been finding better ways to squeeze the juice out of the orange. Its getting harder and more costly to do it.

Dr. M. King Hubbert was an interesting guy in this area

Dr Campbell, is a former chief geologist and vice-president at a string of oil majors including BP, Shell, Fina, Exxon and ChevronTexaco. He explains that the peak of regular oil – the cheap and easy to extract stuff – has already come and gone in 2005. Even when you factor in the more difficult to extract heavy oil, deep sea reserves, polar regions and liquid taken from gas, the peak will come as soon as 2011, he say.

Peak Oil is the point when the world has used up 50% of its global reserves of oil. When this happens the economic community goes into panic as it is the day when everyone realises we are running out of oil. There are very limited reliabale figures about this and as a government/oil company/anyone trying to control this date you can play with the numbers:

Table of major oil reserves by year they were predicted

So in the mid 1980’s how did some countries magically find a great deal of oil, but no one found any more reserves. Why did this happen?

Oil prices were rising dramatically as demand was growing, percieved supply was not growing and hence countries were starting to look at alternative energy. Anyone holding oil may soon be holding a worthless commodity, but if supply was made to appear limitless, the price would fall and people would stop looking to alternatives….bingo lets just change the numbers stating how much we had.

Doug playing today

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