World Energy Supplies Can’t Keep Up With Growth, Progress

YOUR NEW REALITY Oil Corporations Now Control Less Than 10% Of World Reserves Of Oil, Gas The New York Times reports on a coming energy crunch that has the potential to change Western societies in ways that Osama Bin Laden can only dream about : Producers are struggling to pump as much as they can to quench the thirst not only of the developed world, but fast-growing developing nations like China and India, the two most populous countries. To many experts, the steadily rising price underscored longer-term fears about the future of a system that has supplied cheap oil for more than a century. The planet’s population is expected to grow by 50 percent to nine billion by sometime in the middle of the century. The number of cars and trucks is projected to double in 30 years— to more than two billion — as developing nations rapidly modernize. And twice as many passenger jetliners, more than 36,000, will in all likelihood be crisscrossing the skies in 20 years. All of that will require a lot more oil — enough that global oil consumption will jump by some 35 percent by the year 2030, according to the International Energy Agency… To meet world demand, oil producers will have to find and pump some 11 billion extra barrels of oil. Stunning. And those greatly needed extra 11 billion barrels of oil will only quench part of the thirst of a projected overall increase in energy demand of some 65% in the next twenty years. ….petroleum, the dominant fuel of the 20th century, will remain the top energy source. It accounts for more than a third of the world’s total energy needs, ahead of coal and natural gas. Refined into gasoline, kerosene or diesel fuel, oil has no viable substitute as a transportation fuel, and that is not likely to change much in the next 30 years. The problem is that no one can say for sure where all this oil is going to come from. Running out of oil, fuel too expensive for minimum pay commuters and regular electricity blackouts may sound like good news to Al Gore (carbon emissions will have no choice but to fall), but regular, devastating ‘energy wars’, as countries try to snap up remaining resources, may give us more to worry about than the possible effects of global warming. Some oil industry executives are already panicking about a looming oil crisis “if the world (does not) deal with runaway demand and strained supplies” : …the world’s oil supplies are already stretched. The North Sea and Alaska are slowly running out of oil and producers there are struggling to keep production from falling. Russia’s phenomenal oil surge is coming to an end…Nigeria is battling a violent militancy. Mexico…has been stuck in a crippling political debate over keeping out foreign investors while witnessing a dramatic drop in production that some analysts say may be irreversible. The 13 members of the OPEC (Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries) account for three-quarters of the world’s proven oil reserves. But for various reasons, most of those countries are making it harder, if not impossible, for foreign oil companies to invest within their borders. With energy prices rising, OPEC producers are seeing record revenues, which have reduced the incentive to dip into their supplies by boosting production. At the same time, major oil companies like Exxon Mobil, BP and Chevron are finding it harder to compete worldwide, as national oil companies erode their once-dominant positions. Fourteen of the world’s Top 20 oil companies are state-owned giants, like Saudi Aramco and Russia’s Gazprom. That leaves Western oil companies in control of less than 10 percent of the world’s oil and gas reserves. Apparently, in just 100 years, we’ve burned up about a trillion barrels of oil. There may be another 1.2 trillion barrels of drill-and-pump oil reserves to be recovered, according to BP. But one trillion barrels of those reserves will have been consumed by 2038. Some analysts believe another trillion barrels are waiting to be tapped on the bottom of the Arctic Ocean and in countries that now, or may soon, restrict access to global oil corporations. ….the growth in oil consumption almost certainly will need to slow in coming years. But it seems unlikely that developing nations will cut their consumption first. China, India and the Middle East are in the midst of exceptional economic booms and need cheap energy, which is largely subsidized by their governments, to keep growing and modernizing. Oil now accounts for just 19 percent of China’s energy needs. But China’s oil demand is expected to more than double by 2030 to over 16 million barrels a day, according to the International Energy Agency, as more people rise from poverty, move out of villages and buy more cars. Vaclav Smil, an energy expert at the University of Manitoba : “The situation is dire. We need to do relative sacrifices. But people don’t realize how dire the situation is.” I think we’re well on the way to finding out how dire the situation is. Speculators are pushing oil to $120 a barrel, and we may see it hit $200 within a few years, and China, the United States and Russia are privately and publicly clashing over European energy pipeline routes, control of international shipping lanes, the right to exploit untapped oil reserves in the Arctic and Africa, the rise of Iran and the carving up of Iraq.