Oil

Okay, so this is something we've been talking alot about in our class and I've learned alot of surprising things, and I figure most people have no idea about any of this stuff so I thought I'd write about it.

According to an estimate by the United States Geological Survey we have between about 1.5 and 3 trillion barrels of petroleum left in the world. This includes potential sources and known sources that haven't been drilled because of economic reasons.
Now, the average world citizen uses 4.5 barrels of petroleum a year. So at current consumption and current population (~6 billion) we can figure that the world's petroleum will last us another 111 years. However, at the current population growth rate (1.3%) we expect the population to double in the next 50 years or so. At this growth rate we expect the petroleum to only last us another 50 or so years.
Frankly this is big news. This means that in our lifetime we will have exhausted all the petroleum in the world.

Now lets look at the Alaskan wildlife refuge. They expect that it contains about 9 billion barrels of oil. Sounds like alot right? Well, we can assume that if drilled this oil will only be used for americans. So the average american uses 25 barrels of oil per year (note that this is more than 5 times the average world citizen), and there are about 300 million americans. So that means that if we swore off all other oil then we would have enough oil to last us 1.2 years.
Now I have heard the argument that the amount of oil produced per day is limited by the size of the pipeline, so factoring that in the oil will last us 200 years. But here's the rebuttel to that. Let's pump the oil through a line of drinking straws. Then it will last us thousands of years. Point is this argument is stupid. There is a finite amount of oil in there, and putting it into the number of years it would last us is simply a way for people to visualize how much oil is available.
So the real question is this, is it worth it? Is it worth drilling in a refuge for one years worth of oil? Especially when we could easily save this amount of oil if people would stop driving their SUV's and if we could get congress to improve higher CAFE standards. Even if people kept on with their SUV's we could save this simply by everyone filling up the air in their tires. It's not alot of oil and frankly I think we should be focusing on the larger problem of oil shortage than simply putting a bandaid on the problem by drilling.

This is a crisis we are headed towards in our lifetime. If we keep on like we are then there are big problems to come when we hit what's referred to as "peak oil". So here's the deal with peak oil. As our population increases we will increase the amount of oil we use. We are currently producing petroleum that keeps up with this rate. But, we will eventually reach a point when we are producing the maximum amount of petroleum we can and after that it's going to start tapering off. Well, the population is still going to be growing and therefore consumption increasing, but production will be decreasing. So we will reach an oil crisis where production can't keep up with consumption. Now if we haven't already invested in new energy sources we are basically screwed. The USGS expects us to reach peak oil anywhere from 10 to 30 years from now, but the thing is there is noway to really tell when we are going to reach this point.

Anyway, I've blubbered on about this enough for now. I just think this is a really important point that we need to start pushing our government to do something about. Letting the car lobbies get by with making congress vote down the higher CAFE standards just isn't acceptable. (BTW, the most recent vote that failed was to increase fuel effeciency from about 26mpg to about 33 mpg, not a huge increase).
Okay, that's all for now. More to come later, I'm sure.