OIL, ETC.
 

Oil, more properly "petroleum" was discovered about 1869 in Drake PA., and has changed the world dramatically. I was a professor at the Colorado School of Mines which has a large petroleum production department and the Hubbert Center for studying oil supplies...  Long ago I worked for Shell Exploration and production in Houston Texas and shared an office with M. King Hubbert.  He became famous in the 1970s for predicting that US production would peak in 1974 (it did) and then decline (it has).  I met him in the 1980s for dinner and asked if he had a prediction for world oil.  He declined to predict because he said that other countries didn't keep as good records as the US and they lied about their reserves in order to claim a larger share of the market.  More recently another Shell employee and friend of Hubbert, Kenneth S. Deffeyes, wrote "Hubbert's Peak:  The Impending World Oil Shortage". (Princeton Univ. Press, 2001).  He is a world famous geologist at Princeton, teaching "Rocks for Jocks".  He has put this reputation on the line, saying "My own opinion is that the peak in world oil production may even occur before 2004.  What happens if I am wrong?  I would be delighted to be proved wrong.  It would mean that we have a few additional years to reduce our consumption of crude oil.  However, it would take a lot of unexpectedly good news to postpone the peak to 2010."  There are 37.6 million websites dealing with OIL and only 218,000 dealing with OIL DEPLETION, such as.. http://www.odac-info.org/ and http://www.peakoil.net/. Here are a few excerpts...     Peak Oil in 2008   Colin Campbell and the Uppsala Hydrocarbon Depletion Study Group has now made the 2004 upgrade of the peak oil model. The peak is moved from 2010 to 2008 (read more).   Welcome to MK Hubbert Center Hubbert Center is dedicated to Assembling and disseminating global petroleum supply data. M. King Hubbert Center for Petroleum Supply Studies. ... hubbert.mines.edu/ I could also find a lot of "experts" saying this is the old "wolf, wolf" cry and that the oil peak will not occur for 20-50 years.  Whatever.  It will occur in many of our lifetimes and cause a lot of disruption unless we have substitutes well under way.  Figure 2 Graph showing Production (Mbd) against Time (Years), based on Campbell�s data. The four different lines correspond to different possible scenarios taking place from 1996 onward. It can be seen that whichever scenario actually occurs, the end result is reasonably constant. This is because the Ultimate is a constant value, so that more oil now means less in the future: whilst it may be possible to alter the shape of the curve, one cannot alter the area beneath it. The �premature peak� in the early 1970s corresponds to the oil crisis of 1973. Now it is time to re-examine our approach to alternative fuels and hope we can keep ahead of the oil depletion curve.