A wonderful piece of news which should infuriate the gloomy nutters out there.
Not sure how accurate it is but the suggestion is that there's enough oil for us for a very long time.
It would seem that as the oil price went up, inventive people worked out ways to extract the oil that we need.
Not sure how accurate it is but the suggestion is that there's enough oil for us for a very long time.
It would seem that as the oil price went up, inventive people worked out ways to extract the oil that we need.
The investments required to make this boom happen depend on a long-term price of $70 a barrel – the current cost of Brent crude is $95. Money is now flooding into new oil: a trillion dollars has been spent in the past two years; a record $600bn is lined up for 2012.
There are, we now know, monstrous deposits in the United States: one estimate suggests that the Bakken shales in North Dakota contain almost as much oil as Saudi Arabia (though less of it is extractable). And this is one of 20 such formations in the US. Extracting shale oil requires horizontal drilling and fracking: a combination of high prices and technological refinements has made them economically viable. Already production in North Dakota has risen from 100,000 barrels a day in 2005 to 550,000 in January.
So this is where we are. The automatic correction – resource depletion destroying the machine that was driving it – that many environmentalists foresaw is not going to happen. The problem we face is not that there is too little oil, but that there is too much.
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