Why Have We Not Run Out of Oil?

In 1977, President Jimmy Carter went on TV and declared that the biggest crisis that we were going to face in our lifetime was going to be running out of oil.

He couldn’t have been more wrong…Yes we have been burning more of it almost every year since 1977.

But we have more oil now than we did in 1977, and we may never run out.

How is that possible?

In 1977, people knew only of the then current oil reserves, and knowing our consumption rate, with some quick math, you could easily figure out that we would run out of oil within 40 years,

…or about now…that…seems pretty laughable now.

What they didn’t know then is how vast our oil reserves actually are.

It turns out the earth has a much larger amount of oil than we ever imagined. So much so, that we will likely never run out…up to the day we perfect an inexhaustible form of cheap energy such as solar or nuclear fusion. But that’s for another video.

This is all due to Technology advance.

Our technology has enabled us not only to find vast new previously unknown oil reserves in Venezuela and Kazakhstan, for example, but we also perfected ways to extract oil from oil shale using a process called fracking.

Simply put, this is a way to extract oil from shale rock using high pressure water.

It turns out that the United States alone has trillions, not billions but trillions with a “T,” of gallons of oil in the form of Shale rock. That’s almost 10 times more than Saudi Arabia.

And there are trillions more gallons of oil in Canada, in the form of tar sands, which are extractable.

In addition, More oil is being found in previously used oil sites by technologies like drilling sideways, drilling deeper, and using high pressure water to squeeze more oil from a drilling site.

We consume about 35 billon barrels of oil per year, so with the trillions we have available. This will probably last for 100 years or so. By that time, it is thought or hoped, that we will have developed even more efficient energy technology like solar or nuclear fusion.

Now…is all this oil good for us? Is it good for society?

The answer here is yes and no.

It is good because oil is a pretty cheap form of energy. This means our cars are cheap to operate, our airfares are cheap, we enjoy cheap products that are made from oil –

like all the plastics products we use like your potato chip bags, ketchup bottles, even clothing materials like polyester and nylon come from oil.

So we can enjoy the benefits of modern life cheaply.

The bad part is that burning oil produces carbon dioxide, lots and lots of carbon dioxide – which causes devastating climate change, which is getting worse over time.

And when oil is abundant and cheap, there is no financial incentive to develop environmentally friendly energy like solar, wind, geothermal, nuclear fusion.

So, as a society, we either now or pay later…just be sure to choose your poison carefully.