amount of oil we’ll have to depend on is that which is already in the
reserves, which we are now slowly depleting. His whole point is that
oil is finite.
There are an close to two trillion barrels of proven oil equivalent (boe)
stored in rocks around the world, both onshore and offshore.That figure
includes natural gas deposits of about 0.8 trillion barrels, which means
global crude oil reserves are just about 1.2 trillion barrels. However, it is
important to point out from the outset that these reserves data aren’t very
definitive because even the three most respected publications that analyze
global oil reserves—BP’s Statistical Review of World Energy, Oil & Gas Journal,
and World Oil—have different numbers. For instance, BP puts proven
global reserves at 1.188 trillion barrels, while Oil & Gas Journal puts the
figure at 1.29 trillion and World Oil puts it at 1.08 trillion.
Since it is impossible to know who is right among them, I’ve decided
to come up with the average of all these data for the purposes of this
book. That gives us 1.19 trillion barrels, or roughly 1.2 trillion barrels, as
the global oil reserves. Of that, about 6 percent is in North America, 9
percent in Central and Latin America, 2 percent in Europe, 4 percent in
Asia Pacific, 7 percent in Africa, 6 percent in the former Soviet Union,
and about 66 percent in the Middle East, including Libya and Algeria:
Saudi Arabia (25 percent), Iraq (10 percent), Iran (8 percent), United
Arab Emirates (9 percent), Kuwait (9 percent), Libya (2 percent), and
Qatar (1 percent), Algeria (about 1 percent), and Oman, Syria, and Yemen
combined (1 percent).
In terms of consumption, the United States uses 20 million barrels per
day, or 25 percent of the world total, and imports about 60 percent of its
oil needs, mostly from Canada, Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, Mexico, and
Nigeria, in that order. That shows how we stack up against others with
regard to demand and supply.
Other geologists have since pointed out that the rate of oil discovery
has been declining for decades. Princeton geologist Kenneth S. Deffeyes,
who worked with and became a friend of Hubbert at Shell, says global oil
production growth has dwindled to 0.6 percent annually since 1998.4 His
point is that production growth has ceased. But because oil is produced
in so many different parts of the world, it’s misleading to talk about a
global oil peak without looking at what’s happening in different regions.
Looking at each region, we see that U.S. production peaked in 1970,
Russia’s in 1999 (except on Sakhalin Island, which is yet to be developed),
and the North Sea in 2000. Mexico’s largest oilfield, Cantarell, is on the
INTRODUCTION 5