Question

Use economic theory to predict when the world will run out of oil.

Answer 1

Oil is and will always be the most necessary fuel for humankind. It has become a key factor in our daily lives, and yet, we tend to forget that oil is from petroleum, a non-renewable resource. Oil being a non-renewable resource is a major concern that we need to take seriously as this means that one day, we will run out it. Sadly, day by day we are on the growing risk of limiting oil resources as the number of barrels of oil the world uses the rate of about 84 million barrels per day. We are using so much oil so fast that nature doesn’t get enough time to replenish back the amount we are consuming. At the rate we’re going we can run out of oil in the next 53 years or less.

Oil is a non-renewable resource because it is formed from the decaying remains of marine animals that lived 100 to 500 million years ago. Extreme heat and pressure over millions of years turn the ancient sediments into oil deposits. When we ran out of our current supply of oil, nature would take hundreds of centuries to produce more on its own. There have already been many predictions in the past concerning how much longer our oil will last. In 2002 Paul Erlich said, “The world will run out of oil in 2030, and other fossil fuels in 2050.” In 2014 the BP Oil company said, “We have enough oil to last the world 53.3 years at the current production rate.” That was 6 years ago which leaves only 47 years left, and that is with that current production. I’d say production would definitely have increased with time making it even fewer years left.

However, these kinds of Predictions about the future of oil supplies are still a bit controversial and uncertain. As the years go by, new discoveries are constantly being made. We could possibly find previously unknown oil reserves and increase the amount of oil that we have. In the future, we could also possibly find methods of energy conservation that would demand less usage of oil production and would lengthen the current predicted oil supply.

So all possible situations should be considered, the risk of using up oil resources and also the possibility of finding new renewable resources, and start preparing and making a decision from the present.