Oil is cheap. The price of crude has slumped nearly 50% since last summer and filling your car no longer breaks the bank: in the UK petrol prices are averaging £1.07 per litre. Falling prices are due in part to US shale oil flooding the market, combined with a slowdown in Chinese and EU economies, reducing demand. So can we all stop worrying about oil running out, and enjoy the “black-gold” bonanza?
Right now we’d be stuffed without oil: 95% of our transport relies on it, and it accounts for over one third of our global energy supply. The oil we pump up today was formed between 10 and 600 million years ago, from dead plants and animals falling to the bottom of the sea. Turning these organisms to oil is a precise recipe, involving burial and slow maturation at temperatures of between 70 and 160°C. Every year a few million barrels worth of new oil matures underground somewhere, but this is a mere droplet compared to our global consumption of around 30 billion barrels of oil per year.
Writing in a special issue of the Royal Society’s Philosophical Transactions in December 2013, geologists estimate that we need to find three million barrels of oil every day (equivalent to finding a new Saudi Arabia oilfield every three years) to maintain supply. Their estimates suggest we’ll see a sustained decline in oil production before 2030.
Alternative sources like shale oil and tar sands won’t be able to sate our oil appetite for long, and at some point we have to accept that this stuff is going to run out.
