Petroleum Man will be virtually extinct soon
Thursday, April 3rd, 2008Oil was formed in the geological past under well understood processes. In fact, the bulk of current production comes from just two epochs of extreme global warming, 90 and 150 million years ago, when algae proliferated in the warm sunlit waters, and the organic remains were preserved in the stagnant depths to be converted to oil by chemical reactions.
Natural gas was formed in a similar way save that it was derived from vegetal material. It follows that these are finite natural resources subject to depletion, which in turn means that production in any country or region starts following the initial discovery and ends when the resources are exhausted.
The peak of production is normally passed when approximately half the total has been taken, termed the midpoint of depletion.
Oil has been known since antiquity but the first wells were drilled for it in the mid 19th Century in Pennsylvania and the on the shores of the Caspian. The Industrial Revolution was already in progress being driven by the steam engine, fuelled by coal.
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