Preparing for the end of an era…without petroleum

Oil is running out. If we keep using it at the present rate (plus a 3% increase in demand per year!) all known stocks will be exhausted, according to the latest estimates, sometime between 2050 and 2080. As each of the world’s 4,000 or so oil-fields reach maximum “production”, decline to zero and close an unprecedented crisis will descend upon our globalised world. We may even find a few new oil fields, but the price of this “black gold” is bound to increase. First it will reach uneconomic and disruptive levels (e.g. the increase from US $10 to $50 per barrel from 2001 to 2004, the 2006 record level of $ 75 per barrel of crude) and then (as it runs out) to prohibitive levels (above $100/200 per barrel), putting the purchase of petrol well beyond the purse of most developing countries, and beyond the purse of the poor and middle-class in any country.

Furthermore, those countries with oil reserves (e.g. USA, Russia, Nigeria, Venezuela, the Gulf States) are increasingly likely to keep their oil for their own use instead of exporting it to countries (such as Japan, Singapore, Mauritius) which have no oil reserves and whose economy is based on imported oil. As we will see in the next article on solutions, survival for Mauritius in the transition period up to 2020 may depend on us securing diversified sources of oil and NOT on a “mari-deal” with a single supplier.

L’Express