Skeptic Project

I'm not sure if this falls under the category of a conspiracy theory or not, but this was something I came up with:

World oil consumption: 85.98 million bbl/day (2008 est.)

World oil proved reserves: 1.343 trillion bbl (1 January 2009 est.)

--- CIA World Factbook

1.343 trillion bbl / 85.98 million bbl/day = 15619.911607 days

15619.911607 days / 365.25 days/year = 42.764987 years

2010 + 42.764987 = 2052 (around October)

This means that, at the current rate of consumption, proved reserves of oil will be gone by around October 2052.

Thoughts?

Oil extraction hits thermodynamic limits well before it "runs out." Decades ago, uneducated people with simple tools could make oil gush out of the ground in places like Texas and Saudi Arabia. That no longer happens anywhere that I know of.

Today getting at the remaining oil requires increasing investments into technologies run by highly skilled people, which shows that we've probably reached diminishing returns from increasing complexity, a.k.a., Tainter's thesis:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Tainter</p>

When it takes as much energy to get a barrel of oil out of the ground as you'd get back from burning it, then the exercise becomes self-defeating.

This topic brings to mind one kinda-sorta conspiracy theory that (GASP!) may actually have some validity. If you find this to be ridiculous, please feel free to beat me down severely.

I'm very familiar with Antarctica, having written 2 books that take place entirely or partially at McMurdo station (largest US installation down there) and thus I've interviewed a lot of folks who work there and done a lot of research on how things work there. Antarctica is protected wilderness as per the 1991 Antarctic Treaty, which states that the continent is off-limits to commercial exploitation until at least 2041. A signatory nation is not able to have any presence there unless it's conducting scientific research. What I have heard, and a theory that's stated in Nicholas Johnson's book "Big Dead Place" (but which is admittedly speculation), is that there are commercial interests who believe that there are significant oil and gas reserves in Antarctica, but because of course you have to drill through a 2 1/2 mile thick ice sheet to get at them it's not commercially feasible to get at them. However, the Antarctic Treaty positions nations to have infrastructure on the continent such that, IF the treaty is not renewed in 2041 and IF technology has progressed (or oil is expensive enough) such as to make Antarctic drilling economically feasible, the country who's first in line down there will be best positioned to take advantage of it.

Not much of a conspiracy theory I grant you, and even if true it could hardly be the primary motivation for signing the treaty, but I wonder if there might be something to it. Seems like an interest that might occur to negotiators of several countries when they were working out the Antarctic Treaty.

"because of course you have to drill through a 2 1/2 mile thick ice sheet to get at them it's not commercially feasible to get at them"

Don't the ice sheets periodically shift too? Wouldn't that make it impossible to drill a straight hole?

I don't see the point of extracting every last nonrenewable resource ASAP, much of which we waste on stupid hedonism like the South's NASCAR culture. What about leaving Antarctica's resources "in the bank," so to speak, for future generations?

For example, if something happened to destroy civilization in the Northern Hemisphere, say, a nuclear war or a gamma ray burst from a star in the northern part of the sky, the survivors in the Southern Hemisphere would have those Antarctic resources in reserve to help sustain civilization on their half of the planet.