Peak Oil -
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Are we running out of oil?

Petroleum is a finite resource; at some point in the future the supply of oil in the Earth’s crust will be exhausted. However, the quantity of petroleum remaining in the Earth's crust and how soon this resource will begin to run out is a matter of considerable debate and disagreement. Despite the political and environmental costs of reliance on fossil fuels, the global economy is tightly linked to supplies of petroleum. In addition to being essential for current transportation technologies; most products manufactured today, from clothing to automobiles to medical supplies, are derived from petroleum by-products. Therefore, concerns are often raised about the future prospects for world oil supplies. An October 2007 article in The Atlantic reported that Saudi Arabian oil production, the world's largest exporter of oil, is in decline. Are we running out of oil?

Predictions of oil scarcity have had a long history. In 1919 the director of the U.S. Bureau of Mines predicted that "within the next two to five years the oil fields of this country will reach their maximum production, and from that time on we will face an ever-increasing decline." That same year, National Geographic magazine predicted that oil shales in Colorado and Utah would be exploited to produce oil, because the demand for oil could not be met by existing production. In 1956, Marion King Hubbert forecast that world oil production would peak sometime between 1993 and 2000; although his prediction for global oil production was wrong, he did correctly anticipate that U.S. oil production would peak in the early 1970s. Despite the continued growth in global consumption of petroleum, proven oil reserves have increased steadily over the past twenty years, in large part because oil companies have revised their estimates of reserves in known fields. Using older technologies, oil companies could only retrieve about 35 percent of the oil in place; with enhanced technologies, including directional drilling, companies have increased that amount and with new technologies, it is believed that it is possible to extract up to 65 percent of the oil in the field. Moreover, three- and four-dimensional seismic exploration technology has also led to revised estimates of oil that can be economically extracted.