Non Peak Oil Update

In 2006 I wrote a little op-ed piece for Lew Rockwell about the fallacies of Peak Oil. I asserted that proven oil reserves seem to go up every year in spite of both the warnings that we are running out, and that we are consuming it at an every increasing rate. Let


Radford University offers up a nice comparison of “proven resources and recoverable resources”. The high is 2272.5 billion barrels with a low of 981.4. This gives us a median of 1060, an average of 1343, a variance of 386, and standard deviation of 621. Not exactly accurate data, but these are government statistics and may be prone to some inaccuracy. I can interpret this data as either proving or disproving my assertion depending on whether we like the mean, high end of the low end. A variance of 25% of the average might be considered unsure. This is an elegant web page that even Edward Tufte would be proud of.

The Department of Energy has web data on oil reserves. One of them states that total world oil reserves at the end of 2007 is 1.317 trillion barrels of oil. I am a clear winner on this one, assuming we accept the statistics as factual.

LewRockwell.com