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Future of Oil Essay

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Future of Oil

Is the world on the brink of an oil crisis? I decided to look into this possibility, because it seems like a rather serious question, one that I would feel more comfortable about if I had enough information to at least form a fairly justifiable position. After all, the little I knew about the situation before conducting any research yielded one undeniable result: the issue is an extremely divisive one, with plenty of proponents on both sides of the argument.

I decided to look first at the arguments of those who claim that a crisis is looming. George Monbiot summarizes the problem in the following succinct fashion:

“The world's problem is as follows. We now consume six barrels of oil for every new barrel we discover. …show more content…

Do we know how much oil remains in those?

Kevin Kelleher counters, in an article for Popular Science, that the oil expiration date is something that is uncertain and those who claim it is approaching simply do not have the evidence to back up such a prognostication. “If there is an end to the debate,” he writes, “advanced oil-recovery technologies will most likely find it.” Kelleher then elaborates on some of these technologies, including new drills that soak up oil horizontally as well as vertically, thus increasing the amount of oil harvestable per well from 35 to 60%. This is a great technology to be sure — one that will undoubtedly salvage billions of barrels of oil over the next several years if it works as well as Kelleher claims. The problem is that this too ignores the issue of when will the totality of the oil wells run completely dry? And what will we do then?

Joel Bainerman claims that this question is more answerable than some of his peers might think. He cites David Goodstein of the California Institute of Technology who writes in his book Out of Gas: The End of the Age of Oil that oil production will peak within this decade. “Nature left about two trillion barrels [according to a 2000 U.S. Geological Survey] beneath the ground,” he writes, “and the peak will occur when we reach the halfway point.” We’ve already, he continues, consumed

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