Oil in the arctic – never enough

http://www.spiegel.de/wissenschaft/mensch/0,1518,622524-2,00.html

In the article above on a German news page they discuss the resources of oil that are under ground in the arctic. Many nations, as the article describes correctly, have started eying out the potential of these resources.

As the article states correctly, this potential find will just prologue the era of oil by a bit, and almost insignificantly. What I miss is that they put it in numbers. So I try to do that for you.

The article states that the total amount of oil that can be expected to be there is 90 Billion barrels. We use around 90 Million barrels per day. Hence, in an ideal world it would last us 1000 days, which is around three years. Only!

The article also states that it accounts for 13% OF ALL UNDISCOVERED oil. That means that all oil that we have left lasts us for 30 years assuming that consumption does not increase. But consumption does increase and is predicted to be 30% higher than today already in 2015. With that the remaining oil would last us 20 years.

That is well within my excepted life time. Sure, that does not take into account that we have some oil left in the sources that we are tapping now. But I was not even taking into account that the production of oil will decrease as we reach the end of oil, which in turn will lead to dramatic increases in oil prices.

The future is not bright unless we start doing something about this problem.

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