I read a pretty interesting article this morning on the train. Yes, it was in GQ, but don’t discount it. They have some pretty good stuff in there, sometimes. The article, by Benjamin Kunkel, discusses the theory of “peak oil.” “Peak oil” refers to a point in time that oil production fails to increase. Here is how Kunkel sums it up:
peak oil refers to the moment when global oil output reaches a maximum rate—measured in millions of barrels per day or billions of barrels per year—and then goes into decline. The theory was formulated by the American geophysicist M. King Hubbert, who in 1956 (when he happened to be employed by Shell) made the controversial and, it turned out, correct prediction that U.S. oil production would top out around 1970 and begin falling. Hubbert’s model proposes that the rate of oil production for a given oil-bearing region—including, ultimately, the region known as the earth—will follow a more or less bell-shaped curve, with the peak of the curve (maximum production) arriving whenever approximately half the recoverable oil has been extracted from the ground.
The article poses a lot of interesting questions and list out the reasons why the various answers may be skewed and biased. What blew my mind were the consumption statistics. The US consumes 10,000 gallons of oil every second. 10,000! And that is just the US! Another stat that caught my eye was that Royal Dutch Shell grosses about $357 billion a year. In the time that it took me to wrap my head around that dollar figure, the US consumed 100,000 gallons of oil.
There are a couple of other points raised in the article that I thought were key. One is that oil is used for just about everything in modern society. I feel like a lot of the time, people associate oil primarily as a source of energy and forget that plastic, ink, and almost every other type of synthetic material is made with oil. Kunkel also points out the fact even if the US were to lift every regulation on drilling, exploring and producing crude oil, domestically, it still would not come anywhere close to meeting the level of consumption that exist in this country.
It is kind of depressing, but man, I just eat this kind of stuff up. The information in articles like this one, is stuff that I was wondering anyway, but don’t have the time to research. I love it when I can find all of the key issues on a subject, summarized and packed neatly into an article that only has a few curse words, hahaha.