Mexican President Vicente Fox has announced the discovery of a new deep-water oil field, which is believed to contain 10bn barrels of crude....The oil is under 930 metres (0.6 miles) of water and a further 4,000 metres (2.5 miles) underground.
The authors of Transport Revolutions: Moving People and Freight Without Oil were interviewed by the CBC about Peak Oil. "The likely outcome of not dealing with this issue is not an environmental catastrophe. It's an economic and social catastrophe that may leave us unable to deal with the environmental catastrophe," The gushers are gone and that's significant. Big oil discoveries aren't happening any longer. Global society has followed a pattern of depletion tactics, and we have depleted the available oil far enough that we are in danger of losing this beautiful society because of running out of oil.
They describe the effect of $250 per barrel oil as being equivalent to the hurricanes that hit the Gulf Coast in 2005 (Katrina and that other one). Those hurricanes were devastating to the U.S. economy, and high oil prices are always devastating to economic health. The price of oil can only increase from where it is today, because the supply of oil is not increasing while the demand for oil is increasing.
The tactic of making products in far away countries because of cheap labor, depends on the ability to cheaply transport the products around the world. So long as the transportation cost is less than the savings due to cheaper production, then production is incentivised to be done wherever it is cheapest to do so. But this practice of transporting goods all around the world is hastening the end of the oil age.
Popular Mechanics' take on peak oil and possible solutions.
'In January, Jeroen van der Veer, chief executive officer of Royal Dutch/Shell, e-mailed his staff that the world will peak in conventional oil and gas within the decade. He wrote: "Shell estimates that after 2015 supplies of easy-to-access oil and gas will no longer keep up with demand." It used to be unheard of for oil executives to talk about limits to oil production. ' Several other oil company executives are saying the same thing. This is a serious problem because in Transportation governments must take action twenty years before the oil crisis in order to have the transportation system survive the crisis, so says a U.S. Department of Energy study. 'Previous energy transitions (wood to coal and coal to oil) were gradual and evolutionary; oil peaking will be abrupt and revolutionary.'
To solve the peak oil crisis it isn't sufficient to find more liquid fossil fuels. The problem is bigger than a simple question of supplies. The fuller problem also includes environment and climate change problems, to be specific if we do not take drastic action right away the sea's will rise because of arctic ice melting into the ocean.
We must be wise enough to break our mutual oil addiction. If we solve for the immediate problem, the oil supply issue which will occur once the world passes the oil peak, the other problems will remain unsolved. We will still continue to use fuels which spew climate changing poisons into the environment causing increasing temperatures around the world, causing rising sea levels, and causing untold numbers of diseases in all life on the planet.
To be sure there are ways to extend the availability of liquid fossil fuels. Techniques exist to increase output from oil wells. They exist to convert coal into oil.
Greater efficiency can help a lot. In history every increase in fuel efficiency has required government action, either taxes or mandates. In todays environment of politicians striving to practice free trade and to unfetter corporations from the shackles of regulations this may be a non-starter, but history really has shown that corporations do not do things like this unless they have no other choice.
The Hubbert peak theory, also known as peak oil, is an influential theory concerning the long-term rate of conventional oil and other fossil fuels production and depletion. It predicts that future world oil production will soon reach a peak and then rapidly decline.
This is a list of countries by proven reserves of oil mostly based on The World Factbook accessed in September 2007.
