What are the present day global reserves of oil?
What are the global consumption rates for it?
How fast are those rates rising/falling?
How fast is new oil being made? Is it being made at all?
Will the human race run out of oil and when?
I can’t answer all your questions, but the “best” estimate as to how long the oil will last is 40 years. Of course, I’ve got a magazine from the 1950s which says the same thing, meaning that we should have ran out of oil some 10 years ago. We haven’t ran out of oil because one of the things that’s happened is that it’s now cheaper to extract oil from places it was inconcievable just a few decades ago.
There’s also a company which claims to have developed a process whereby cheap crude oil can be synthesized using garbage. If true, then we may never run out of oil.
Here’s a run-down on petroleum: finding it, pumping it, and seeing a given oil-field taper off. Thoughtful arguments are given as to what we may expect in the future. The article looks at a number of different aspects, & you may find it interesting.
It describes the Hubbert Peak which has applied to the past, but is disputed as to the future. In brief, they find oil, they put in wells and infrastructure and pump more and more until that field runs low, and reaches the point where it costs more in energy to get the energy of the remaining oil.
Then they look elsewhere.
Part way down the page is a nice graph in colors showing production increasing and then tapering off in numerous countries. Note the future is disputed. Note also how production in each country tends to begin, swell, and taper off; the graph adds them all together and it looks as if all countries listed are tapering off–but on reading the text, OPEC and the former Soviet Union are still increasing production.
The limit on pumping it is simple: when it costs as much energy to extract it as you get from a field, it’s worthless. “The end of cheap oil” means higher prices due to scarcity, and also the increasing inefficiencies of extracting it. “When oil production first began in the early twentieth century, at the largest oil fields 50 barrels of oil was recovered for every barrel of oil used in the extraction, transportion and refining processes. This ratio becomes increasingly inefficient over time: currently, anywhere between one and five barrels of oil are recovered for every barrel used in the various recovery processes.”
In 1956, Hubbert did correctly predict the peak US production to be in the early 1970’s, but he also said the world would peak in 1995-2000.
A big factor is oil discovery: we can keep developing new oil-fields as long as we can keep discovering them. Whether we can keep discovering more is hotly disputed.
“In a recent year, 25 billion barrels of oil were consumed worldwide, while only eight billion barrels of new oil reserves were discovered.”
(My position: I’m for a smooth transition, whenever the transition occurs.)
Here’s and old thread from GQ that touches on some of your questions… but it also meanders around a bit too. 