Oil production - the only way is up
Remember those 1970s scare stories about the world running out of oil?
I can't remember if it came before or after the "we're-heading-for-a-new-ice-age" scare. But the idea was that oil would run dry - then the lights would dim, cars run dry and plastic grow scare.
Thirty years on and there's more oil derived energy being used in more homes by millions more people. Car ownership has been extended to people who twenty years back couldn't afford a bicycle. It's too much plastic that's the problem, not too little. Far from running out, more reserves of oil and fossil fuel have become available than ever in human history.
Why have the doom-merchants been quite so wrong? Later day adherents of Jacques Rousseau, the nay-sayers consistently under-rate technology. It is technology that allows us to find and access new deposits of oil, and lets us utilise what we find more efficiently.
On a recent trip to Uganda, I was curious to learn more about the estimated 2 billion barrels recently discovered there. Heritage Oil let me visit one of their drilling sites. There’s vast potential – and done properly, it could be a great benefit to millions of people around the world.
If oil does present us with geo-political challenges, perhaps it won’t be problems posed by shortages, but rather those created by abundant discoveries that'll be the headache.
Posted on 10 November 2009 by Douglas Carswell