Running out of oil

In other petroleum news, the second in a series of seminars on the petroleum industry was held in Schaible auditorium on Saturday. Rich Seifert, an energy specialist and program chair at the UAF Cooperative Extension Service, presented the seminar, titled “Peak Oil.”

According to data presented at the seminar, the world’s reservoir of oil will be half gone in 2008. Once the “peak” is past, because the remaining reserves will be more difficult to extract, the availability of oil on the market is projected to decrease by about 3 percent per year. Demand is projected to continue rising, however, which will lead to possibly dramatic increase in the market price of petroleum products.
According to the presentations at the seminar, Norway is the only country that is currently planning (publicly, at least) for what may be a coming change in the global energy market. A pamphlet from the seminar calls oil “the cheapest and most convenient energy resource ever discovered by humans” and that as its availability declines “industrial societies will have increasingly less energy to do all the things now commonplace that give us the standard of living we enjoy.”

More seminars in the series are planned, but have not yet been scheduled.

University of Alaska Sun-Star