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Is Oil really going to run out?

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I can't say I'm sure about this. 90%+ of people say that it will run out and I've been doing research in it because I am doing it for a school project but all I can find a literally hundreds of stories about how it will eventually run out and most of these give dates ranging from a few years to a few centuries but then I found this one article http://peaktimesonline.wordpress.com/2011/11/25/on-the-edge-of-a-perilous-oil-less-new-world/#more-209 which basically went against everything most people said and now I am not so sure whether it will or not. What are you guys thoughts?

I hope I am not too late but check out the site called The Oil Drum. The site is rather advanced and can be a bit of a struggle to read but it is written by top experts in the oil field and has very intelligent people. The information is so good that governments do monitor the site for news and the press do get information from there. It is not for the faint of heart but it will certainly educate you in matters of oil and energy.

Oh and there is no way of talking about reserves with any degree of certainty. The actual reserve numbers for a lot of countries are state secrets. There is no real auditing for reserve numbers in many cases and oil companies, exporting nations and importing nations all have strong incentives to exaggerate the amount of available reserves in the ground. Oil companies will want to inflate their numbers to increase their stock prices, this exaggeration is likely to be especially prominent in the shale gas business recently. Oil exporters want to keep their numbers high to maintain political and economic influence good examples are how the OPEC nations inflated their reserve numbers so they can increase their production rates. Finally importing nations are likely to play along to all this as they do not want to cause alarm to their populations by declaring their oil supplies are running low; a low oil supply will cause people to hoard oil exacerbating any problems caused by a fuel shortage. The oil shortage of 2001 in the UK and the general oil crisis of the 70s are good examples of this behaviour.

In addition if you write about oil running out highlight the fact that it is not running out that matters but rather the phenomenon known as peak oil. Oil will be extracted for absolutely ages but peak oil will come in a much shorter time frame. Despite what other people say peak oil does exist. We see peak oil production in numerous countries, check out the production rates in the US, UK, Mexico or any individual well for that matter. All wells exhibit a similar behaviour of an increasing rate of production which then hits a peak followed by a terminal decline. Some countries such as Russia are a exception to this rule due to "above ground" factors effecting their rates of production (namely the economic collapse of the Soviet Union).

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Is Oil really going to run out?

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