‘End of Oil’ author to speak at Embry-Riddle

“Every 24 hours,” journalist Paul Roberts writes, “we burn 81 million barrels of crude.”

For oil producers, it’s getting more difficult to locate the large fields where oil can be cheaply pumped. So high prices will likely continue, ultimately leading to change — be it the rise of alternative fuels or a scaling back of our consumptive practices, says Roberts, author of “The End of Oil,” a celebrated 2004 book on the subject.

In this edited interview he gave last week by telephone from his Washington state home, Roberts provided a glimpse into his views on oil, the subject of a lecture he’ll deliver Wednesday night at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach.

The title of your book is “The End of Oil” What do you mean by that?

You can already see oil companies struggling to replace the oil they sell. We’re certainly running to the end of the cheap oil.

If you were to draw a map of the world of areas where we have extracted oil and where we haven’t explored, what would be left?

There’s the realists’ oil map and the optimists’ oil map. For the realists, the big oil has already been found. It’s in the Middle East, a bit in Russia. Otherwise, you need big investments to find little fields. The optimists say we’ve got improving technology. We haven’t looked at Greenland and the northern top of the planet. But if oil is to be found in east Greenland, that’s where the oil companies would be; they wouldn’t be getting their heads blown off in Iraq.

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