Here to dismiss that notion is Leonardo Maugeri, senior executive vice president of the Italian oil company Eni and author of The Age of Oil (2006). In an opinion piece published in the Wall Street Journal, Maugeri argues that peak oil is a mere fantasy, a tale told only by doom-sayers and the ill-informed. In fact, Maugeri says there is more than enough oil to go around for a long, long time, even if that idea “offends conventional wisdom.” For this hopeful proclamation he offers three good reasons.
First, no one knows how much oil there really is. According to the US Geological Survey, there are at least seven to eight trillion barrels of oil trapped underground. More than two trillion of these have been deemed “recoverable,” while “proven” reserves are around 1.2 trillion barrels. However, Maugeri argues that these data are unreliable, as current estimates don’t take into account unconventional oil resources (like ultra-heavy oils, tar sands, shale oils, etc), which would double the overall figure. To Maugeri, it’s simple: if you don’t know how much oil you have, it’s impossible to calculate the curve of future supply.
Second, new technologies will enable us to extract much more oil than Hubbert (and other doom-sayers) assumed. If this seems like a bit of cheery science-fiction, just look at the past thirty years: Today, we are able to recover 35 percent of the oil contained in known reserves, up from 20 percent in 1980. As oil-retrieving technologies improve, that figure is sure to go up. Maugeri is quick to point out that such technologies already exist. Generally known as enhanced oil recovery (EOR) technologies, they entail injecting an oil reservoir with chemicals, heat, steam, and heavy gases such as carbon dioxide and nitrogen. EORs have produced fantastic results, leading to the revival of many oil fields that had been considered exhausted.
Third, only one third of our planet has been sufficiently explored for new oil deposits. This means that there might be quite a bit more oil out there than we think. Maugeri argues that until recently it has not been “economical or technically feasible to undertake big and sophisticated exploration campaigns when oil was abundant and cheap, as it was for most of the past century.” In other words, before everyone started clamoring about peak oil, the big oil producers had no reason to develop the technology needed to thoroughly search the globe for oil. As these technologies become affordable, oil companies will begin to plumb new depths in search of crude.
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