47 comments on A Simpler Way to Calculate Global Oil Reserves?
Comments can no longer be added to this story.
| Show without comments | PDF version
47 comments on A Simpler Way to Calculate Global Oil Reserves?
Comments can no longer be added to this story.
| Show without comments | PDF version
Search The Oil Drum with Google
Support The Oil Drum
Recently on TOD:World
TOD:Campfire
- What "Lower Consumption" Means
- Tricking and Treating the Future
- Meeting Energy Decline Part-Way - Potatoes?
TOD:Europe
- The US stimulus and "green jobs"
- EROWI - energy return of water invested
- An interview with Stoneleigh - the case for deflation
TOD:Canada
- In this house, we obey the laws of thermodynamics!
- The Round-Up: October 24, 2008
- Compressed Air Energy Storage - How viable is it?
TOD:Australia/NZ
- The Bullroarer - Saturday 7th November 2009
- The Bullroarer - Friday 30th October 2009
- Details of Solar Flagships Released
TOD:Net Energy
Blogroll
Energy Sites
- The Coming Global Oil Crisis
- Die Off
- Dry Dipstick
- Energy Bulletin
- From the Wilderness
- Life After the Oil Crash
- Peak Oil Crisis
- Peak Oil News and Message Boards
- Powerswitch
- Rigzone
- Matthew Simmons
- Wolf at the Door
Environment & Sustainability Sites
- The Daily Green
- EcoGeek
- Eco Street
- Green Car Congress
- Green Options
- green.alltop.com
- Gristmill
- RealClimate
- Sustainablog
- Treehugger
- WorldChanging
Blogs
- The Big Picture
- Casaubon's Book
- Cleantech Blog
- Clusterf
k Nation (Jim Kunstler) - The Cost of Energy
- David Strahan
- The Energy Blog
- Entropy Production
- European Tribune
- GraphOilology
- Health After Oil
- jeffvail.net
- Mobjectivist
- Peak Energy (Australia)
- Peak Energy (USA)
- R-Squared
- Resource Insights
Finance & Economics Blogs
- Calculated Risk
- The Crash Course
- Ecological Economics
- Econbrowser
- Environmental Economics
- Infectious Greed
- The Mess That Greenspan Made
- Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis
Organizations
Peak Oil Primers
Beware email scams!
Beware email scams claiming to be from this site. We do not have any job openings. If anyone contacts you about a job at The Oil Drum, do not reply to them, and definitely do not give them any personal information or send them money. Read more here.
“First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they fight you. Then you win.”
—Gandhi
User login
Contact
- Content: editors at theoildrum dot com
- Tech support: support at theoildrum dot com
Personnel
- Editors: Nate Hagens, Gail the Actuary, Prof. Goose
- DrumBeat Editor: Leanan
- Contributors: ace, Engineer-Poet, Heading Out, jeffvail, JoulesBurn, Sam Foucher, Robert Rapier
- TOD:Campfire: Glenn, Jason Bradford
- TOD:Europe: Chris Vernon, Euan Mearns, Francois Cellier, Jerome a Paris, Luís de Sousa, Rembrandt, Rune Likvern, Ugo Bardi
- TOD:Canada: benk, Libelle
- TOD:ANZ: Big Gav, Phil Hart, aeldric
- Emeritus: Stuart Staniford
- Technician: Super G
License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.










GAIA Host Collective
One might also consider the African continent, the largest after Asia. There are decent deposits in North Africa, and around the Niger delta, but most of the continent is virtually bereft of oil.
A small number of locations around the globe have most of the oil. This is also true of a number of other resources, such as copper, gold and diamonds.
The concept above is vaguely interesting, but I'm afraid it doesn't have much merit.
I think the approach posted of extrapolating the US peak only to regions that have oil makes sense.
And the current approach is valid what it gives is a upper bound on the amount of oil available. Its simple and you can assert with almost a 99% certainty that there is less then 2 trillion barrels of oil remaining. So yes it has merit and is valid as long as you recognize that its probably a good upper bound.
The next upper bound is I believe the approach of extrapolating the US peak to oil producing regions.
Next you get into detailed arguments.
I think that once you consider all the factors we will recover at best another 500 billion barrels of oil period.
Which gives 16 years at our current usage or probably 20-30
in reality.
Once you can no longer support growth in a oil based economy it will rapidly shift to a new economic model or more likely adopt some of the the past models. In general it looks like the new economy will be one based on concentration of wealth and power not generation of new wealth if you can call this new.
The only real difference this time around is that we will have high tech kings. The consumer industry will probably shrink but I think electronics will stay popular since you need to give the masses their circus.
1.) Health Care ( probably continue to advance but subsidized to focus on the health needs of the wealthy.)
2.) Electronics consumer goods continue (Circus needed)
3.) Communications continue to grow ( Post peak they will be even more important)
4.) Military technology ( Massive growth )
5.) Alternative energy
6.) Electric rail transport for the masses and advanced air transport for the wealthy.
As you notice these are all industries that have a low footprint most are "Cyberspace" focused or biological. I don't see any growth in the traditional manufacturing/consumer goods. Its funny that it looks like in the end a small number of people will get their flying cars. For the general population I see a massive move back to agriculture but I'd not call that growth followed by re-industrialization in the western countries to support basic needs ( Kitchen goods, bicycles, clothes,cheap toys etc) this is not growth. Recycling the McMansions will probably be a big industry for a while.
The wealthy get besides the traditional trappings of wealth.
Huge homes servants (slaves)
Advanced health care,Flying cars,Instant advanced unrestricted communication.
The poor get Xboxes and Cable TV and restricted internet access along with either a long rail commute or a small flat in the city. I suspect in a lot of the world poor people will be sterilized probably via sterilization drugs after one child if they are lucky. They will get enough health care to prevent massive plagues along with basic medicine.
Sterilization will be used to punish most breaches of law.
The military gets many cool new toys to keep the status quo.
The middle class will be reduced to the technical and managerial people needed to support the rich, military and oversee the masses.
And we probably will sit here for years until we have two technical breakthroughs
1.) Fusion
2.) A real space elevator or cheap space access method.
And the world population drops back to a reasonable levels.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tethys_Ocean
It would be interesting to know how much of the bed of Tethys has not been explored.
Heaven forbid.