Peak Oil?
Monday, September 24th, 2007Do you believe we are seeing the effects of peak oil right now with the price of oil steadily climbing upward? It’s hard to say for sure. As for me, I believe we could be dangerously close to peak oil, and it is a very scary thought. There are plenty of arguments to dispute it, something along the lines of “Middle Eastern countries and OPEC or our government are behind the high prices and we should see oil return to $30 a barrel”, but we need to take a bit deeper look.
Over the last 30-some years, our oil production in the United States has slowly but surely declined steadily, making us more and more dependent on foreign sources, particularly Middle Eastern sources. How much longer can the oil fields of the Middle East keep up with the continuous world growth and surge in demand? These fields have been pumping for a long time now, with no big exploration finds to supplement them. The production will ultimately decline much like it has in the US as millions of barrels of oil are pumped out every single day. It is not a question of if it will happen, but rather when it will happen. With the sheer volume of oil that the Middle East supplies the world, if its production begins to falter, we are in big, big trouble of not having the supplies we need.
Of course the Middle East is not our only supplier of oil, but this problem is not confined to that area (it just makes a good example as the thought of a country like Saudi Arabia struggling to pump oil seems ludicrous). Most oil-producing countries of the world are facing the same situation; production that is far ahead of exploration. Peak Oil is not a topic to take lightly, even if you are doubtful that it is even an issue right now. There is massive amounts of information and debates on the peak oil subject, and I will try to consume as much as I can to bring new, up-to-date information on both sides of the subject to this site.