How Much Petroleum is Left?

The world is currently facing a crisis on oil, petroleum, and in the near future all fossil fuel reserves. On the specificity of petroleum we as Americans are not doing so well. We currently produce around 5000 thousand barrels per day as of 2007, but in the past forty years the number has been decreasing significantly (EIA). In fact, we hit our peak production rate in 1970 when the number of barrels per day produced was around 9600 per day (EIA). Since then the production rate has been decreasing. The energy information administration only goes as far as 2007, so the number today in 2009 is most likely far below 5000. On the worse side of economics, our demand and use per day has been going up since 1970 (EIA). It had a few drops here and there, but has specifically gone up from 17,308 consumed to 20,680 (EIA).

It’s hard to say when oil will specifically run out because people will keep finding new sources long after current predictions say it will run out because consumption will continue to increase and oil companies will just keep finding smaller reserves than what they’re used to. Conventional oil currently is expected to run out around 2100, but by then it would cost too much for it to be economically viable for anyone to use. Our current lifestyles of cars and planes that take us anywhere we want to go has to change because it will change. People do not have a choice in the matter. There are some promising alternatives for what to run cars with like algae fuel or electric cars, but the problem with every other alternative is that petroleum is needed to make everything including all plastics and the development of some metals. So when petroleum runs out we cannot build the alternatives.

Drilling in ANWR wouldn’t be that beneficial for the country as a whole because even though petroleum production would go up it wouldn’t last that long. There is really only around 30 billion barrels of oil there and any geologist will tell you that you’re probably only going to get around 40% of what’s in there. That means that America would only get 12 billion barrels out of the 30. At our current rate of 8 billion barrels per years that 12 billion would only last a year and a half. Not including the fact that our consumption rate has been increasing around one to two billion barrels per year so the amount of time ANWR would actually last is less that 1.5 years. It would therefore insignificantly help the economy for a very short amount of time. Oil and its products would be cheaper for less than 1.5 years and the oil companies would make a huge amount of money.