Only very, very marginally. Production is dictated primarily by demand, while reserves are dictated by effort in exploration. Exploration is related to demand, and hence reserves are only vicariously related to production. However the relationship is fairly weak. Once reserves reach a point where they are sufficient for the foreseeable future exploration effectively stops. Thus we can have periods where production is massive and reserves are low, or periods where reserves are high and production is low.
Very, very debatable.
As you can see by looking at this publication by the EIA, we can be over 95% certain that peak oil won’t hit for another 20 years. The probability that it hit around 2000 is probably less than .01%. That’s a lot of scope for debate.
AFAIK Canada primarily has oil sand resources rather than shale oil. And Canada has been economically extracting sand oil for decades. Shale oil itself has been economically viable for decades. Less profitable than liquid crude, and thus less utilised, but energetically and economically profitable nonetheless.
Perhaps more importantly, nobody factors in non-liquidresources into figures of oil peaks. They are an entirely separate issue, and have the potential to supply oil at current usage rates for several thousand years. When folks speak about peak oil they specifically are not including oil sands, shale oil, coal oil and so forth.
People have been using oil for millennia. There is a record of a literal eternal flame in Persia dating back over 2000 years, fed by a natural oil soak. Alexander the Great’s armies were attacked by catapults loaded with straw and rags soaked in mineral oil. American Indians were also reported as using small doses of oil as a medicine, notably to cure parasitic worms.
Petroleum distillate had been in existence for centuries prior to the invention of the automobile, which is why it was considered as a fuel. Usually produced by small operations like apothecarists and chemists, but a dedicated oil mining and processing plant producing petroleum distillate was already operating by the mid 19th century, well before the motor car.
Back to the OP. If you look at this figure you will two interpretations of how much oil we’ve used. That figure can be interpreted in two totally different ways to derive that “50% gone” claim, and different sources will use it differently, and occasionally the same source will use them interchangeably, creating much confusion.
First off it means that we have used about half of the oil that we know we can currently extract. If you look at the column on the left you will see that cumulative production, ie the amount of oil we’ve taken so far, makes up about 700 billion barrels. The amount of oil in proved reserves makes up about 800BB. That means that we’ve used almost half of all the oil that existed in proved reserves. It is important to realise that proved reserves simply refers to that oil that we have drilled for, and that we know with reasonable certainty that we can extract using today’s technology, and at a minimum 33% profit at today’s prices. Needless to say proved reserves fluctuate wildly as extraction technology changes. It fluctuates even more wildly as prices increase and proven reserves have increased in the last 12 months simply because with high prices more reserves can be extracted profitably. So really saying that we have used almost half the proved reserves is pretty meaningless. Basic supply and demand economics means that we have used half the oil in proven reserves for the last 100 years. That’s because it’s not usually worth test drilling unproved reserves to prove their quality and supply when we have half of all our supply in proven reserves already. Nonetheless the claim is made frequently.
The other interpretation is that we have found almost half the oil that we can ever feasibly extract. So if you look at the LH column you will note that cumulative production and proved reserves combined make up about 1600BB. That leaves about 800BB in undiscovered resources and another 800BB in reserves growth (ie, the oil we know is there, that isn’t economic to extract today but will be tomorrow as prices rise and drilling technology improves). IOW we have 1600BB that we know we can get at and at best another 1600BB that we can hope to get at. We have already found half the usable oil that we are ever going to find. This is a much more meaningful claim to make. But this doesn’t mean that we’ve used half the oil. We’ve only used ~25% of it.
Hope thatmade some sort of sense.
