From the current oil price, we can see what happened. At present, the global demand for oil is still increasing, but the price of oil per barrel has dropped to 10 to 15 USD.
This is because in recent decades, with the improvement of exploration and production technology around the world, a large number of super-large oil fields have been discovered, and we can also exploit oil fields that could not be exploited before, especially the breakthrough of shale oil mining technology in the United States and the low-cost gushing of oil in the Middle East, which has greatly increased the oil supply.
Due to the difficulty and high cost of most domestic oil fields, there are even billions of losses a year. This shows that the commodity of oil is really flooding at present, and it feels that the whole world is flooded with oil.
Therefore, it is normal for no one to shout that the oil is used up. In addition to the reason that there is a lot of oil now, the development of science and technology in recent decades has also begun to have a deeper understanding of the formation of oil.
This is the real reason why our attitude towards oil has changed.
Oil, an organic mineral, was always considered to be exhausted in a short time due to technical problems at that time in the last century, especially after the bell curve of oil production was put forward by the famous geophysicist harbert, which aggravated people's panic about oil exhaustion.
However, there are some problems in this prediction, which is based on the proven reserves at that time. According to the above picture, there will be no oil available for mankind in 2200. But what harbert didn't expect at that time was that more and more oil was being exploited.
1973 during the middle east war, Arab countries cut off oil transportation to the United States, and gasoline prices soared by 40%, which was followed by panic. Motorists queue up at gas stations for gasoline, and then the price of gasoline will rise.
At this time, automobile manufacturers are scrambling to update their assembly lines to produce stingy compact cars instead of gas-guzzling behemoths.
Entrepreneurs have invested millions of dollars in new solar energy and wind energy companies. Experts say that the next days need to collectively tighten their belts, and people should start saving energy instead of wasting it.
At the same time, experts also predict that the shortage of fossil fuels will continue to increase, and by 2000, the oil price will reach $0/00 per barrel/kloc. Obviously, the experts are wrong again. There is no oil panic today. Even after inflation, oil prices are still falling all the way.
Today, oil wells all over the world, from Saudi Arabia to deep trenches off the coast of Brazil, will produce about 75 million barrels of oil every day to meet human needs. This is about 25 billion barrels per year, and this number is still rising at the rate of 2% to 3% per year.
This increase in production speed will always meet people's demand for oil, so there will be no shortage of oil for a long time, and it is hard for people in the world to think that oil will be so cheap today.
At first, people thought that there was a certain amount of oil on the earth, just like there was a certain amount of money in your bank account, which would run out one day. This idea is really correct.
But at that time, there were many oil reserves that we couldn't find out at all, and the oil stored in the tiny cracks in the rocks could not be exploited. The recovery rate of a lot of oil is very low, and a lot of oil is abandoned.
Now we can squeeze oil out of rocks by injecting water into the ground to improve oil recovery, so the amount of oil we can finally get is determined by economy and technology.
Roger Anderson, director of the Energy Research Center of Columbia University, predicts that more oil fields will be discovered in the future, and the oil recovery rate of oil fields will be greatly improved.
In recent years, we are still exploring new submarine oil resources. Geologists have perfected the seismic imaging technology of seabed geology, hoping to find more huge new oil fields.
At present, the oil production in the Gulf of Mexico will reach1500 million barrels, 30 billion barrels off the coast of Brazil and 30 billion barrels off the coast of Angola and other parts of West Africa, totaling about 75 billion barrels.
So we don't know exactly how much oil there is on the earth now, but what is certain is that its reserves are far greater than human estimates. So we said in the last century that oil will run out, which is obviously out of date. It's not true either.
How much oil can be mined in the future actually has a lot to do with our human technology.
Let's talk about the origin of oil.
The origin of oil has always been a mystery, which is also the reason why human beings can't accurately predict that oil will not be exhausted at present. There are two main theories: organic oil generation theory and inorganic oil generation theory.
Organic oil generation theory: We know that oil is a complex organic mixture, which contains a lot of hydrocarbons. People think that oil is caused by the accumulation of algae and other microorganisms in shallow water. These microorganisms are first covered with sludge to isolate oxygen and form organic sludge.
Then these organic sludge were covered with new sediments and settled, and survived for millions of years at high temperature and pressure of about 150 degrees. Long-term high pressure will cause chemical reaction, which will transform protein, carbohydrates and other compounds in raw materials into crude oil. If the temperature rises to about 200 degrees, natural gas will be produced.
Inorganic oil-forming theory says that the oil and gas reserves found at present are predicted by biogenetic theory, which cannot explain why the regional differences of oil and gas reserves are so great.
Therefore, the inorganic oil-forming theory holds that oil and natural gas have nothing to do with living things. When the earth was formed 4.5 billion years ago, because the earth itself contained a lot of carbon and hydrogen, they reacted inside the earth and formed a lot of hydrocarbons, and today's oil and natural gas came into being.
In other words, oil comes from the combination of carbon and hydrogen in the earth, and it has been continuously produced. If this theory holds, then oil is really inexhaustible.
Based on our current ignorance of the causes of oil, it seems unscientific to shout "oil will run out" now. So it's hard to say such a thing now.
In the future, it is possible for us to synthesize liquid fuel artificially.
For many years, natural gas has been mainly used to generate electricity and provide fuel for kitchen stoves and some household stoves.
In the Alaska oil field, it is pumped back underground to maintain the pressure of the oil well. In Nigeria and the Middle East, natural gas is only ignited locally, which is a complete waste of resources. But this situation will become a thing of the past.
In fact, we have long mastered the method of converting natural gas into liquid fuel, but the initial cost is very high. For example, 20 years ago, the cost of building a natural gas plant producing 654.38 million+barrels of liquid fuel per day was about 654.38 billion US dollars.
But with the development of technology, the cost of building a natural gas plant has been greatly reduced. Today, it only costs $654.38+000 billion to build a natural gas plant, reducing the total cost of producing a barrel of natural gas liquid fuel to less than $20.
So we humans now are not worried that there will be no fuel available in the future. At present, it is really rich, which is why electric vehicles or hybrid vehicles can't replace fuel vehicles at present. Because oil is not a consumable that people can't afford.
At present, human beings are more worried about pollution.
At present, most people think that oil can always accompany human development, but it will bring another disaster and serious greenhouse effect.
The so-called greenhouse gases, mainly water vapor and carbon dioxide, make the earth warm and livable by absorbing the heat radiated from the sun.
When humans burn hydrocarbons or fossil fuels, carbon reacts with oxygen. As a result, there is more endothermic carbon dioxide in the air.
Since industrialization began around 1850, the carbon dioxide content has risen from 280 ppm to 365 ppm at present. The current global warming, sea level rise and climate change will bring disaster to the future.
Environmentalists once hoped to reduce carbon dioxide emissions through oil shortage, but now it seems a bit unlikely. Because oil is really too rich.
At present, we are vigorously developing new energy sources, such as wind energy, solar energy and nuclear energy. The main purpose is not to deal with the exhaustion of oil, but to deal with the increasingly serious climate problem.
From this point of view, the prediction of future oil is not a shortage problem, but an unimaginable environmental problem brought about by a large number of oil exploitation.