Greenstar!
Two REALITIES: Peak Oil
EVERYTHING YOU WANTED TO KNOW ABOUT 'PEAK OIL' ... BUT JUST DIDN'T THINK TO ASK!
Did You Know?
- The world is running out of oil
- Humankind uses 1,000 barrels of oil per second (1 barrel = 42 gallons = 160 litres)
Note: Another way of looking at our inconceivable human thirst for oil is by imagining an Olympic sized swimming pool full of oil being drained every 15 seconds
- Few things that we own, eat, drink or depend on to move around or keep warm would exist were it not for cheap oil
- 1 gallon of oil contains the equivalent of 100 tons of prehistoric plankton and algae that captured ancient sunlight, got buried, and over time were squeezed into some of the highest density energy around
- Oil allows us to do 100 times more work than without it. It increases our strength, speed and ability to manipulate the planet to staggering levels
- 10 gallons of gas (38 litres) contains the same amount of energy as 4 years of people powered manual labour
- It has taken us 150 years to extract half of all this life changing material from the ground and burn it. In so doing we have raised the CO2 concentration in our air from 280 ppm to 390 ppm.
- The second half of our planet's oil reserve will be of a lower quality, require more energy (oil) to get and be increasingly more difficult and dangerous to access.
- In 1955 for every barrel of oil we consumed each year we discovered 8 more. Now the opposite is true. Today for every barrel of oil we discover we are consuming eight. The gap between discovery and consumption continues to widen.
- We consume around 30 billion barrels of oil per year, 85 million per day
- The Oil Age began in 1859 and will last 150-200 years. We have reached the midpoint of the world's oil supply and the days of cheap oil are over. As Paul Hawken has said, “The Stone Age did not end because we humans ran out of stones. It also follows that the Oil Age will not end because we ran out of oil”
- 47,500 oil fields have been found. The 40 largest ones have produced 75% of all the oil consumed.
- Alberta's Tar Sands produce over 80 million tonnes of GHG's each year. This is greater than what is produced by Canada's entire car fleet.
- There is no conceivable substitute for oil. This liquid fossil fuel makes our modern world possible and when it takes more oil to pull it out of the ground then we get back the Oil Age will be over. What will replace it?
