Going by the current world wide consumption, how long are world wide crude oil reserves estimated to last?

Question

How may 100s of years hence would the last gallon of gasoline/disel crank the last engine ?; What about aviation turbine fuel that powers the current aircrafts ? When would we replace all these with Hydrogen powered/N powered engines ?

Answer 1

I totally agree with Don.  Let me add something I think is important.  Besides price, the critical impact on oil consumers is politics.  Right now, 75% of the worlds KNOWN reserves are in the Middle Eastern Arab countries.  Oil consuming countries like the USA must accept whatever price is set, but do you really believe it actually costs 20 times more for them to produce it than it did in 1958?  Of course not.  In most cases they are tapping the exact same domes they were then.  They have an agenda like anyone else, and this is how it is funded.  The same is true of politics.  The USA's dependence on oil has drawn it into a political agenda it would be much better off without. An example would be the war in Iraq.

Answer 2

That's hard to answer. New sources of oil are discovered every year. You are right that we have 100s of years before the last gallon of gas cranks the last engine.

Answer 3

Don't forget other petroleum products that are overconsumed as well.  I saw a documentary that had an oil insider say that mideast reserves could dry up in 10 years.  I can see why the world is fighting for the oil rights if that is true.  I saw that 50% of US farmers have switched from their normal crops, soy, wheat, etc. and have started planting corn, which makes me think something is up.  The US is all over S. America right now and I think it's because Bush and Co. smell the oil there.  Right now the US owns the only refineries that can process the type of crude found in S. America.  So I guess their oil has to come here.  I had some friends who specialized in locating oil reserves in the US, and their work was completed in about one year so that makes me think there wasn't much to find.  Look at it this way, Dallas/Ft. Worth is going ahead with horizontal drilling in the middle of the city.  It sounds pretty oil desperate to me.  The US needs to convert to some other energy immediately.  Who cares if gas is $12 a gallon if they only allow each person to buy 5 gallons or some other restrictions?  The recent cancellation of flights by the airlines points to some sort of shift.  They have raised their prices and the airlines have still gone bankrupt, what gives?  You have to wonder how the wars will be fought in the future without gas in the tanks.  The Air force has shifted to the use of unmanned aerial vehicles to do recon and bomb dropping.  We may have to use a UAV to take our kids to school?!  No more giant yellow bus, that's for sure!

Answer 4

I heard somewhere that with our current extraction technology and known reserves we've got enough fossel fuel for about 200 years.

Sadly under our current system nobody in power gonna seriously think about alternative energy for maybe the next 150 years.

Answer 5

The resources are being depleted already. I guess we could spend billions of dollars turning over and drilling up every bit of land on the planet, and we'd always find one last gallon of oil. BUT why should we when there are ways of becoming energy independent that don't A) Ruin the environment and B) put us at the mercy of countries that are not aligned with our interests.

In fact, as I am thinking about this, there is not one country that we are relying on for oil that is not using it for political leverage over us (Venezula, Russia, Iran, etc)

We are doing a great deal of harm to ourselves by not becoming independent of oil!

Let's take the gloves off, we invaded Iraq because we needed to have more leverage over the oil in that region.

Answer 6

Let's just say....

A looooooooooooooooooong time.

:D

Answer 7

a week Thursday

Answer 8

Do not fear ,we will never run out as the plants are recycling the CO2 so fast u would not believe. The plants take in the CO2 and very quickly give us back the O2 ,but keeps the C for the plants food. When the plants die the leaves break up and wash down the rivers to the delta where it will deteriorate into OIL & GAS. It is recycled just as simple as our water cycle is.

Answer 9

According to a textbook the prediction is that the current oil supply will run our by 2020 and that is not that far away. I believe they (researchers and scientists) are working on it right now. They are making fuel from sugar , corn oil, and carbon dioxide so it may not be long before we have a replacement.

Answer 10

The question is misguided. May I explain?

What is happening is that we have largely removed the easy to get, lower cost oil.

We have about half of known reserves left in the  ground, perhaps a bit more.

But as we have to go deeper, reach into pockets taht will not flow horizontally into the next reservoir , while we still get some oil, it costs so much more. At the end we will never quite run out of oil. it will just be too costly to recover it.

So, we might have SOME oil to extractr for a few hundreds of years. But we will abandon a lot.

The right question might be, how much crude can we get for $100 a barrel, How much for $200 a barrel, ande how much at 500.

Because that is what is going to happen.

Replacing current engines? We will do that when we can not afford to use them as is. If we have prop aircraft we may be powering the props electrically, via a fuel cell when the cost of that drops below the cost of using a diesel fuel turbine.

Answer 11

A very long time, and that does not even include the material in oil shale deposits.

Answer 12

Never.    When it costs thousands of dollars to get one gallon of oil out of the ground, it will be left there instead.   Peak oil, when we can't continue to increase the rate at which we pump oil out of the ground every year is well past in the US and is probably here for the rest of the world.   Over the last couple years, even with high oil prices, production has not risen but in fact decreased.    It took a hundred years or so to use up the easy to pump stuff, but will take much less time to use up the rest that will be cost effective to get.