The End of Oil

From the The Sustainable Scale Project, a graph that displays the time and size of oil discoveries over the last decades.



This stunning development suggests that we have already found most of the oil that is recoverable. Even with increasingly sophisticated technology and a rising oil price, the number of discoveries has flattened off. How much future oil will be discovered? Here is one, rather scary prospect.



I got pointed to this fact by the book "Half Gone" by Jeremy Leggett, which convincingly argues that we may already reached the point of Peak Oil, where half of the recoverable oil has been extracted and the amount of oil produced per year will be declining from now on. Running out of oil is one reason to look for alternatives. The more frightening is, of course, the fact that we are poisoning our planet with carbon dioxide.