In 1999, a famous American said the following
Producing oil is obviously a self-depleting activity. Every year you've got to find and develop reserves equal to your output just to stand still, just to stay even
Snip…
By some estimates there will be an average of two per cent annual growth in global oil demand over the years ahead along with conservatively a three per cent natural decline in production from existing reserves. That means by 2010 we will need on the order of an additional fifty million barrels a day.
That famous American was no left wing enviro-facist nut case.
It was our own soon to be vice president Dick Cheney.
Consider for just a moment the implication of what the man is saying. He is saying we NEED to find
50 BILLION BARRELS ….
Per DAY… of additional production within 10 years of 1999.
If similar dynamics of economics persist we would need to find and ADDED
50 plus billions per day of production by 2020. Plus an
added 50 billions plus per day production by 2030.
If one looks at the rate of decline of currently producing oil fields, and then factors in the falling rate of new oil field discovery,
"http://www.berr.gov.uk/files/file28217.pdf"
one reaches the inevitable conclusion that things cannot continue to go in the same direction without a massive supply and demand problem.
A natural question must arise as to whether—given this problem—it might be wise allow drilling in currently environmentally protected areas. But even allowing for the most optimistic production numbers from these resources, we see that these areas cannot provide more than a tiny trickle of the massive new oil production requirements that underly our problem.
Simply put, the USA cannot drill itself out of this problem by opening up the ANWAR and continental shelf protected reserves.
In addition, there are very limited new international oil resources that can be drilled to produce the required new production.
Further, the potential new international reserves are frequently located in inconvenient locations that are either politically unstable (Africa), or politically unfriendly (Russia).
Even when those problems are addressed, many of these reserves have to be shipped out across other countries that have their own political instability (Turkmenistan-Afghanistan)
The United States military is already reconfiguring it’s force structure to allow force projection in these newly important areas of oil production. But at some point it becomes questionable how many areas of the world we can simultaneously militarily control to quench our ever escalating demand for oil.
In short, a strategy based upon producing our way to low oil prices seem destined to ongoing bloody failure over the medium to long term. Which raises the question as to whether there is any alternative.
We are all aware that Jimmy Carter was an incompetent boob; and that conservation can provide no help in addressing this problem.
Still, just for the record, it may be well to remember that
The results from the adoption of these CAFE standards
were that from 1977 to 1985, while GDP rose 27 percent, oil
use fell 17 percent, net oil imports fell 50 percent (by 4.28
million barrels a day-72 percent greater than U.S. imports
from the Persian Gulf), and gross imports from the Persian
Gulf fell by 87 percent.
So as we look at our current (and future) problems, we would do well to remember that increased drilling could only affect the over all oil price/supply situation by a trivial amount. These small results would only be manifest 3-5 years in the future.
Whereas policies to reduce consumption could have a much
larger AND more
immediate impact.
