Dear Shaji,
This is estimated in several ways, depending on who is doing the estimates. The most usual value is Known Oil Reserves divided by Yearly Oil Production (R/P), which theoretically should give you the number of years that you can continue to produce oil. In this case it is no considerations taken to new discoveries of oil or the cost (price) to recover the oil. The value today is around 33 years. The consumption today is around 30 gigabarrels and the known oil reserves around 1,000 gigabarrels. You can also include an estimate on the undiscovered oil reserves, based on geological conditions and past experiences. This is of course much more difficult. If you look at the last 7 years, the new discoveries have been 10 gigabarrels a year. Assuming that this continue, the R/P is around 50 years. If we suddenly make a very big discovery, things will change. The geological experts are trying to make estimates on how large the unknown reserves are, based on the natural conditions that are needed for the oil to develop. Of course, this is a matter of interpretations and they come up with different numbers. At the moment the lowest estimates are 1,000 gigabarrels and the highest 3,000 gigabarrels. This give R/P of 67 years to 133 years. Consumption effects the production and if you include the rate of growth of production, it effect the R/P. DOE and the Europeans estimate that we will have a production of around 42 gigabarrel year 2020. If you include the growth the R/P will be 40 to 80 years, depending on your beliefs on unknown oil reserves. Oil reserves exist under different conditions in nature. From pockets of clean oil to different kind of geological mixtures. The kind of deposit will greatly effect the cost of getting it. This is not considered in the R/P values. It is numbers that point to an around 40% availability of oil reserves at current cost levels. Considering this, the oil reserves will never be finished, since it will always be a rest that have an unacceptable cost to retrieve. This number will be varying with development of new retrieval technologies. In the 50s a Professor Hubbert developed calculation methods for determining peak production of finite resources (Hubberts Peak). When the first oil crises came 1973, he was asked to do calculations for oil and he presented this to the US congress. As a part of his testimony, he testified that US reserves passed peak production 1972, the North Sea would pass peak production 1992 and the Middle East 2002. His predictions have been quite accurate so far. If you compare peak production figures with the consumption estimates, it is no space for the 2020 estimates from DOE and the Europeans. In fact, US need to take more of the possible production and this is contra dictionary to a development in the third world. On the other hand, the oil reserves are outside of US and it might take military persuasion to keep the oil flowing in that direction. The Iraq situation is a part of this also, US must show that they are serious against threats and oil supply is included but not mentioned. I hope that the above is a good start for you, if you want to study this questions. Hakan At 07:49 AM 9/4/2002 +0000, you wrote: >when are we going to exhaust fossil fuels, can any one tell me how >scientifically this is estimated. >Shaji > > > > >Biofuel at Journey to Forever: >http://journeytoforever.org/biofuel.html > >Biofuels list archives: >http://archive.nnytech.net/ > >Please do NOT send Unsubscribe messages to the list address. >To unsubscribe, send an email to: >[EMAIL PROTECTED] > >Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/ ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor ---------------------~--> Sell a Home for Top $ http://us.click.yahoo.com/RrPZMC/jTmEAA/MVfIAA/FGYolB/TM ---------------------------------------------------------------------~-> Biofuel at Journey to Forever: http://journeytoforever.org/biofuel.html Biofuels list archives: http://archive.nnytech.net/ Please do NOT send Unsubscribe messages to the list address. To unsubscribe, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
