US Defence:Oil Almost Out

in Motorways by Jon C — April 24, 2010 at 7:11 pm | 7 comments

An interesting article online from a Californian environmental lawyer Nicholas C. Arguimbau is causing some controversy today - he says oil will almost be gone in 20 years with no planning on how the world will cope.

He quotes a report that says demand for oil will begin to outstrip supply in 2012, and will already be 10 million barrels per day above supply in only five years.

That’s not the view of some greeny climate change pressure group but a gloomy report this year from the United States Joint Forces Command. You can read it here

The report says:

By 2012, surplus oil production capacity could entirely disappear, and as early as 2015, the shortfall in output could reach nearly 10 MBD. To generate the energy required worldwide by the 2030s would require us to find an additional 1.4 MBD every year until then.

During the next twenty-five years, coal, oil, and natural gas will remain indispensable to meet energy requirements. The discovery rate for new petroleum and gas fields over the past two decades (with the possible exception of Brazil) provides little reason for optimism that future efforts will find major new fields.

And a report from the United States Department of Energy also seems to predict conventional oil will be almost all gone in 20 years, and there is nothing known to replace it.

Production of petroleum from existing conventional sources has been dropping at a rate slightly over 4% per year for at least a year and will continue to do so for the indefinite future.

The lawyer says that the graph implies that we are past the peak of production and that there are 750 billion barrels of conventional oil left (the areas under the “conventional” portion of the graph, extrapolated to the right as an exponentional).
Assuming that the remaining reserves  were 900 billion or more at the halfway point, then we are at least 150 billion barrels, or 5 years, past the midpoint.

The energy report says that total petroleum production from all presently known sources, conventional and unconventional, will remain “flat” at approximately 83 mbpd for the next two years and then will proceed to drop for the foreseeable future, at first slowly but by 4% per year after 2015.

If all this is true, just remind me again, why are more conventional cars, SUVs and more motorways to encourage car use the answer?

Tags: Greens Oil peak oil United States Joint Forces Command.