Oil Age ends in about 50 years?
The world has enough oil reserves for 42 years at current production
rates.
Oil companies try to replace resevers as the consumption rises |
This was announced Thursday in a report of British Petroleum Ltd,
Bloomberg.com wrote.
"Fossil fuels will remain the dominant source of energy well into the
future", British Petroleum Ltd Chief Executive Officer (CEO), Tony
Hayward, said at a presentation in London. Global proved oil reserves
fell last year, the first drop since 1998, led by declines in Russia,
Norway and China, according to BP Plc.
Oil reserves totaled 1,258 trillion barrels at the end of 2008,
compared with a revised 1,261 trillion barrels in 2007, BP said in its
annual Statistical Review of World Energy.
"Declines in Russia, Norway, China and other countries offset
increases in Vietnam, India and Egypt," BP said on its Web site.
BP Ltd and other oil companies are struggling to replace reserves as
access to deposits becomes harder, and older fields in places like the
UK and Mexico are depleted.
Russia passed a law in 2008 that limits foreign ownership in some of
the country's biggest energy and metals deposits.
Middle East countries, which hold 60 percent of global reserves,
restrict access for international companies, novinite.com reports.
However there is a different point of view expressed by The
Australian.
"All of that looks pretty encouraging, particularly as last year's
ratio of reserves to annual production stood at 42 times. In the
simplest terms, that ratio means global conventional oil reserves will
last 42 years if production keeps going at current levels and there are
no new discoveries.
That's the good news, but on the flipside there's a lot of muttering
in the oil industry about some developing nations' tendency to overstate
their reserves for political purposes.
Against that, oil extraction technology is improving all the time and
the "proved reserves" numbers are meant to refer to oil that is readily
extractable by existing methods. In the simplest scenario, drillers can
now send wells out horizontally to do a much more thorough job of
extracting oil from existing fields than they did, say, 10 years ago.
That's clearly a plus. But back on the negative side, there's a
difference between proven reserves and economically extractable
reserves, since some deeper fields aren't worth exploiting unless oil is
closer to $US80 a barrel than $US30. With the crude price now at the
upper end and rising, that will increase the amount of economically
recoverable oil. Miners would say it's lowering the cut-off grade.
Conclusion? We won't run out soon and the final date for the Oil Age
will be put back further and further as the price rises. Don't bank on
the tar sands, meanwhile, since there's another dimension: CO2
emissions. Converting tar sands to oil releases huge amounts of CO2 and
there's no current technology available to stop that. Then again, there
could be one out there.
All of which suggests we might still be arguing about the end of the
Oil Age in 50 years. Let's hope that by then it will all be hypothetical
thanks to the development of other energy sources". |