Friday 3 October 2003

Oil and gas running out much faster than expected, says study

Now do you get it? Time to wake up and smell the coffee people! Instead of devoting the remaining oil and gas into coming up with alternatives we're busy wasting it taking the kids to school in our new SUVs. There is a lot of technology that has been developed which could be taken further which would mean ending our dependence on oil and gas. But that would also mean ending our dependence on oil and gas companies - and thereby ending their control over us and the wealth of this planet. That's what it's all about. They say they haven't found a suitable alternative, bullshit! They haven't found a suitable alternative which allows them to retain their monopoly control over us, end of story!

Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely.


World oil and gas supplies are heading for a "production crunch" sometime between 2010 and 2020 when they cannot meet supply, because global reserves are 80 per cent smaller than had been thought, new forecasts suggest.

Research presented this week at the University of Uppsala in Sweden claims that oil supplies will peak soon after 2010, and gas supplies not long afterwards, making the price of petrol and other fuels rocket, with potentially disastrous economic consequences unless people have moved to alternatives to fossil fuels.

While forecasters have always known that such a date lies ahead, they have previously put it around 2050, and estimated that there would be time to shift energy use over to renewables and other non- fossil sources.

But Kjell Aleklett, one of a team of geologists that prepared the report, said earlier estimates that the world's entire reserve amounts to 18,000 billion barrels of oil and gas - of which about 1,000 billion has been used up so far - were "completely unrealistic". He, Anders Sivertsson and Colin Campbell told New Scientist magazine that less than 3,500 billion barrels of oil and gas remained in total.

Dr James McKenzie, senior assistant on the climate change programme at the World Resources Institute in Washington, said: "We won't run out of oil - but what will happen is that production will decline, and that's when all hell will break loose."

Present annual oil consumption is about 25 billion barrels, and shows no signs of slowing. That would suggest a "production crunch" - where consumption grows to meet the maximum output - within the next couple of decades.

Dr McKenzie said that on this topic the argument split between economists and geologists. "The economists think it will just force the price of oil up, which will mean it will become economic to extract it from all sorts of unusual places, such as tarry sands or deposits which are 90 per cent rock and 10 per cent oil. But the geologists say - you tell us where the deposits are and we'll find them. We've looked and we can't."

One side-effect of having lower oil reserves might be that the worst predictions of climate change would be forestalled - because there would be less fuel to burn, and therefore less carbon dioxide, the greenhouse gas, produced.

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