From: Jeff Green [activist@bongoboy.com]
Sent: Friday, March 04, 2005 7:17 PM
To: HVBIODIESELCOOP@yahoogroups.com
Subject: [HVBIODIESELCOOP] Free Press Articles on Bio-Diesel

Climbing Hubbert’s Peak
By Jeff Green
 
It’s as simple as this: oil is a finite resource and we’re running out. That’s a fact that is not being denied by anyone. What is subject to debate is how long that will take and what we are doing – or need to be doing – in the meantime.
 
There are almost 700 million vehicles on the planet – they all use oil. All our common fertilizers and pesticides, our clothing, plastics, fabrics, packaging, and a hundred every day items are all based on oil or natural gas as primary ingredients. To grow, process and deliver our food, we use ten calories of oil for every calorie of food produced. All in all, humans on this planet consume more than 86 million barrels of oil each and every day.

Discoveries of large oil deposits have been in steep decline since 1962. Demand, on the other hand, has been soaring. While the oil industry and the government will tell you that we are always finding new supplies of oil, those finds are small. In fact, oil production overall has been declining at about 1.1 million barrels per day and there is evidence that the decline is accelerating.
 
Britain's Oil Depletion Analysis Center confirmed, citing data from "Petroleum Review," that daily oil depletion is now exceeding 1m b/d. In other words, every day, the world is producing 1.14 million barrels per day less than it did the day before. By analyzing data from the 18 largest oil producing nations, "Petroleum Review" calculated that production from these countries peaked in 1997 at 24.7 m b/d and that by 2003 it had fallen to 22.1 m b/d.

The largest oil field on the planet resides in Saudi Arabia, the Ghawar Field. At one time it was estimated to hold 100 billion barrels of oil. But we’ve been pumping from that field for 60 years now and need to infuse the field with seawater to push out the remaining oil to manage current yields. The problem is that the Saudi’s are reporting that 55% of what they pull from the field is the very same seawater that was pumped into it in the first place. In order to maintain current global oil production we need to find three new fields this size in the coming years and in the past 60 we’ve only found this one.

Sure, there are new projects coming online and new fields being discovered, but with the rapid increase in energy use from petroleum resources, experts estimate that by 2007 we will be “over the top”, a point known as Hubbert’s Peak.
 
In 1956, Geophysicist M. King Hubbert accurately predicted that oil production would peak in the United States in the early 1970’s. In 1971 he worked out a formula predicting that global oil production would peak in the year 2000. When this did not happen, his theory was roundly panned by the energy industry. But others feel that Mr. Hubbert was close and that the actual peak will come sometime between 2004 and 2007 and even the industry is beginning to pay attention, though they will not say so publicly. One telling sign is that they are no longer build new refineries. Why build an expensive plant if the reserves are running low? They may deny Mr. Hubbert’s ideas in public, but the actions of the industry tell a different story.
 
The point of all this is that unless we begin looking for viable alternatives – today – the world will not be a very pretty place come the end of the first decade of the 21^st century.
 
Jeff Green
jeff@bongoboy.com