YSK: At the current rate of consumption there's only 50 years worth of oil left in the world
There are 1.65 trillion barrels of proven oil reserves in the world as of 2016.
The world has proven reserves equivalent to 46.6 times its annual consumption levels. This means it has about 47 years of oil left (at current consumption levels and excluding unproven reserves).
This means that the oil is going to run out in our lifetime
Source/more reading: https://www.worldometers.info/oil/
Update: It is infact not true (or just partially true), because it only considers already known oil reserves that can be pumped out with current technology.
There is more oil that can potentially be used as technology and infrastructure advances, so the estimate of 50 years is wrong.
For the correction thanks to [email protected] (their original comment)
67 replies
I wish this was true so that there would be a hard limit to within this century, on how much ff related damage we will do.
Unfortunately, they are still finding more, particularly in the north. How much yet-to-be-proven oil still out there is what really should be considered along with technology improvements that increase how much oil can be effectively recovered.
Not to mention the vast reserves known to be in Antarctica.
That treaty is only going to last so long before people start getting desperate and start fighting over it.
Oooh I didn't think about that... I'll update the post
The reason for the 50 years of oil, as I heard it explained, is that this is how far ahead the oil companies plan. They look for enough oil to cover the timeframe they plan for. When they have that covered, they don't look, until they need more. When they need more, they go and find it.
I remember when they said there were 30 years left in the '90s.
By 2050, there might even be 70 years of oil left!
"Peak Oil" they used to call it. Lots written about to collapse of everything after Peak Oil. Been predicted since at least 1970's.
Now we need to run out for our own good.
Peak oil was about conventional oil. Had we not discovered other sources and methods for extraction then we likely would have run out. And running out isn't accurate, it's just that oil becomes harder to extract and thus too expensive for regular uses.
There are many things that were predicted as a collapse factor that we then innovated solutions to break past those barriers. We're too smart for our own good, because each time we find new ways to keep going we make things worse and get ourselves even more into a dead end. When we do "run out" of oil of any type, which will happen at the growing rate we use it up, will we be smart again and find replacements for all the things petroleum is used for (not just fuel)? One important one being fertilizer to make food grow in our otherwise barren soils. Fun fact: people need to eat to live. Most people in the world, especially the western world, exists and survive because of food thanks to oil.
Lastly, we would have done so much better post-collapse if things had happened naturally with a smaller population and less damage to the environment. The higher you fall, the more it will hurt, and we're damn high now compared to the mid/late 20th century.
In other words, we did hit Peak Oil and that's what caused the development of things like fracking, oil sands, and deep ocean drilling.
Peak oil was reached locally, not globally. Enough need to drive innovation, but not all of the fun aftereffects predicted.
I point this out as "peak oil" was more than just "no oil", and I don't want that lost on the young ones. It was about the collapse of everything dependent on oil.
Otherwise yes.
You are correct. It is worth reminding others that humans nearly went extinct twice.
The way things are going we're all going to be dead before it gets to that point
Probably because of all the dipshits in this thread specifically, acting like we don't need to stop extracting and using oil.
And it could be caused by nuclear fallout before climate change gets critical
This thread is filled with people who don't grasp what a finite resource is. Saying "I remember hearing that x years ago". Sure there's probably more it there somewhere, but we don't need to have to the finish on this. There are are kids who are going to grow up, people who aren't born yet. Hell, at current rates, we might fuck up things with climate change. Which, even more reason to use less.
Call me selfish, but I want my nieces and nephews, to be able to grow up into a prosperous world and not some weird dystopian hellscape.
I think our point is that we don't know if this is a good prediction or not. They both keeps crying wolf.
We're not cheering for it, we're just skeptical.
Skeptical of what? That it's finite? Or how much is left? Or that climate change is real?
Because I'm definitely seeing people who think we have unlimited oil, that there's always going to be more, and that climate change is not only a hoax but isn't caused by humans at all. Some of those folks are in this thread, some of those folks I know in real life.
Skeptical of the timeline prediction, you disingenuous git.
Sorry you don't like their tone but they're right.
They're right to put words in my mouth? Fuck on off with them.
I heard the same thing 30 years ago.
There are still unproven reserves waiting to be discovered.
Under the Arctic. Underneath the seabeds in the deep oceans. Probably other places that are hard to get to right now.
The question that really needs to be asked is not can we find more oil, we absolutely can and will seek it out. We should ask, can the environment that we live in support more burning of even more oil? We all know that answer, that's why we're cutting our emissions down rapidly. /s
The environment that we live in is more fertile now that we’ve got more CO2 in the atmosphere.
More people die of cold than of heat.
I’d say our environment is A-OK with us burning oil.
This is the dumbest thing I've heard in a month, and I heard donald trump talk.
Fertile for what though? It's true there is more greening in some places, but that doesn't equate to a better world for humans and animals used to the previous climate. Plants are better at adapting to this, for now anyway.
The fertility of the soil that I brought up isn't even about CO2.
Fun fact, with climate change you can get both cold and heat deaths. Warming of the Earth doesn't mean just heat.
Need to get outside of that echo chamber of climate denial. Oh right, you all have mostly moved on from denial to "it's fine". I forget the talking points sometimes. Harder to keep up with those than the facts.
These are healing hurricanes!
Fuck off, Ben Garrison
I genuinely don't understand what you mean. Fertile how? It's pretty obvious global temperatures are increasing, heat related deaths are more common in areas that previously weren't an issue. Catastropic environmental events seem to happen every couple months.
You have an article you can share because it sounds like a bad take
The amount discovered in each of the last three years has been less than a year's worth of consumption. The global consumption rate is still rising. At some point we will necessarily run out. The lack of readily available reserves has already lead to "innovations" like fracking, oil sands, and deep sea extraction. Those techniques weren't profitable when production is easy, but they have delayed the inevitable.
I fully expect to see solar powered wells extracting oil that otherwise has a negative EROI in my lifetime.
I believe prices will increase dramatically long before we actually run out. Any non-critical usage of plastics and petroleum products will be phased out for economic forces if nothing else.
The trick is figuring out how to make that happen. Today.
You could easily argue that practically non-existent passenger trains and slow adoption of EVs in the US is primarily caused by cheap gasoline. Maybe if we fixed prices to be higher, we’d be able to make the progress we need
I believe gasoline is indeed heavily subsidized. I always thought that was a strange choice.
I was in Norway a few days ago and I was impressed how pretty much all the vehicles I saw were EVs and that the bus system appeared to be relatively efficient.
Yeah don't bother thinking about the future. The market will sort it out. Just go buy some shit.
It actually gives me hope that there’s a chance we’re going to do something about it.
Honestly we've known peak oil would occur in our lives for several decades. Not that you could tell by any project to prepare for such an event.
There was 50 years worth of oil left 20 years ago too
The disconnect between the general public and the realities of the petroleum industry may be the largest gap in existence. Pretty much any article you read gets 99% of the info hilariously wrong as the journalist has no idea wtf they're talking about.
Well, not in mine. So good luck with that!
"The report says we can release 565 more gigatons of co2 without the effects being calamitous." "It says we can only release 565 gigabytes." "So what if we only release 564?" "Well, then we would have a reasonable shot at some form of dystopian post-apocalyptic life, but the carbon dioxide in the oil that we've already leased is 2795 gigatons so..."
Point being, we already have oil we haven't burned yet that will shoot us far past any limits we've pretended we'll adhere to, and yet we're still looking for more oil to dig up. How can this end well?
I've heard this for my whole life. Oil runs out in X years, until they develop affordable ways to dig deeper and get at more
Cheapest oil runs out in x years. Mid cost in y years. Expensive in z years. Then we get into “manufactured” oils.
Oil isn’t going to run out, it’s just going to get more expensive.
I'll be 91. I'm sure I'll have bigger problems by that point.
......such as having been dead for the past 49 years!
Shiiit, 1985 to 2075? That's a long life
Congrats on reaching 91!
I was curious how best to cut down on our usage, if we'd be aggressive, how long we could make our oil last.
From the EPA, seems the like roughly 40% of an oil barrel ends up being used to create gasoline source. The transportation sector accounts to 2/3 of our total oil consumption. In the transportation sector, roughly 54% of energy is used just for passenger cars. source
If everyone in the world stopped driving gasoline cars and switched to a 100% renewable option, we would only cut our oil production by about 36%. That changes the timeline from 50 years to 78 years.
Pretty saddening to think about. Hopefully some technology improvements for oil recycling come around quickly
It's ok, there isn't 50 years of world left.
There's not? Why?
Climate collapse
No wonder you guys are so damn stressed if you really think climate change is literally going to end human existence on earth.
Read the fourth, most recent IPCC report - it's essentially a metastudy synthesising a lot of hard science.
The picture is grim.
Why do you people insist on making this insane point every time? We're talking about the unnecessary death of everything you've ever seen. Stop trying to lighten the mood you absolute twat.
Every human ever has believed this. Christians have believed they're the last generation for 2,000 years now
I wish it would run out much sooner. Burning fossil fuels is responsible for 20% of all deaths in the world.
Glad you already learned this is probably nonsense. The wrong reasoning is very similar to much thought about overpopulation. The amount of people that makes for a place to be overpopulated is a function of how societies work and the technologies they have at hand. One extra issue there is that improvements in technology usually lead to population growth, so much progress gets cancelled out.
I remember going to a presentation in Boulder Colorado in 2005 or somewhere near there about how the world will run out of oil in 10-15 years, they had tons of data they had collected with a bunch of researches and everything.
We just keep discovering more and more oil, and get better at extracting it.
I mean, yes, but there is a finite amount, we just don't have the ability to accurately gauge how finite. We also created new techniques for extraction and technology changed to enable those new techniques.
The information was good at the time, but it won't get better at the same rate, we're closer to the truth now than we were before because of advancement.
Anyway, my point is the new estimate is much closer to true than the one your comparing it to.
They've been saying this for 50 years at least.
Part of me wishes that the oil would run out sooner to give governments more urgency to actually do something about our fossil fuel dependency, cause apparently the increasingly apparent effects of climate change just aren't enough motivation.
Off topic but the amount of oil we have left is the least of humanities' concerns right now imo.
So the oil companies have a limit and eventually it will stop.
What's the implication? Invest in oil barrels?
Oil barrel recycling
No, I think quite the opposite. I learned this recently and I was quite surprised no one ever uses this as one of the arguments for renewable sources of energy.
Because why invest in an industry that is basically declining and wouldn't be around after 50-60 years.
People have been using this as an argument for renewables since what? The 70s oil crisis? As new ways to access hydrocarbons got discovered the horrified realization was that there are plenty of reasons to bail on those faster than they run out, unfortunately. The issue isn't that we'll run out, it's the amount of damage we'll cause until that point.
And also, it'll take much longer to run out, but others have mentioned that already.
This thread is interesting to me mostly as a periodic reminder that culture wars have shorter memories than one would think. People forget hotly contested issues and the public opinion battle lines around them at a horrifying pace. You'd think it has to do with old people dying and new people growing up, but it's a lot faster than that.
It's because it isn't true. We don't go looking unless it's needed.
Consider especially huge infrastructure like refineries, pipelines, shipping terminals, that take many years to break a profit. Why would anyone build those anymore?
At this point, new exploration and drilling too. I don’t know how long it takes for those to be profitable, but if countries follow through with EV and other targets for renewable energy, we should expect a huge surplus and price drops in less than a decade
This has been said since the 1970s.