Let me tell you what I've been learning about oil. And by oil, we always mean "light sweet crude" which is the top-floating 20% of all oil reserves that is cheap to pump, cheap to refine and the basis for all affordable energy on this planet. The thicker muck that lies below the "light sweet crude" is full of sulfur, much more difficult to extract and very VERY expensive to refine. In fact, "heavy sour crude" is only used to make asphalt and other industrial use lubricants because it simply costs too much to get the gasoline out of it. But when various companies announce their "oil reserves" it always sounds like a lot, but ask them how much of their reserves are light sweet crude, they won't tell you. Wells are capped when the sweet stuff is gone.

Here's more: The average bite of food travels 1,500 miles to get to your mouth (that's a whole lot of trucking). Almost all Wal-Mart items travel at least 3,000 miles before you buy them. It takes 7 gallons of oil to make a single automobile tire. Every new car requires 1,200 gallons of gasoline just to manufacture it! Oil has kept our swelling populations fed because pesticides and fertilizers are made with oil. Synthetic fabrics, all plastics, rubber and computer chips could not be manufactured without oil (computer chips alone use 60 times their weight in fossil fuels just in the manufacturing process.) The list goes on and on.

This world is hopelessly addicted to oil. What about alternative fuels? Solar? Wind? Wave energy? Hydrogen? Those things are terrific, but inadequate to power the nations of the world. You can't make plastic with sunshine, wind can't generate enough electricity and hydrogen only has 60% of the BTUs that gasoline does, and therefore even if an engine could be built to run on hydrogen efficiently (note: "efficiently") we'd still have to re-tool our entire gasoline distribution system to provide hydrogen to fuel 800,000,000 brand new hydrogen automobiles that must be built... using oil. And hydrogen is such a tiny molecule, no container can hold it without leaking about 4% a day. (the dirty secret about hydrogen is that it requires a whole lot of electricity to produce it... where does electricity come from? mostly fossil fuels!)

Here's a fun fact: How much oil does the world use in a day? 88 million barrels. How much oil does the world pump out of the ground in a day? 89 million barrels. Add that up and we use a BILLION BARRELS OF OIL every 12 days. How much longer do you think we can continue to pump 32,120,000,000 barrels of oil a year? Forever? This is what is commonly referred to as "Peak Oil", the point at which we can't pump as much oil as is needed. Consumption of oil is estimated to grow at 3 to 5% a year for the forseeable future (especially with China and India getting the hots for automobiles and abandoning their bicycles). Production of oil is widely thought to be at about it's peak level right now (89 million barrels a day). So what happens next year and the year after when we require 92 million barrels a day, but only 89 million are available? What about when the spread grows wider?

Anyway, Peak Oil is something I've been interested in of late. A super book I liked a lot was Michael Ruppert's CROSSING THE RUBICON, about the decline of oil. The DVD "End of Suburbia" documentary was a fascinating look at how the suburbs grew because of cheap gas for cars and how that will collapse when the 50 mile commute is no longer affordable, and trucks can't supply the mountains of stuff the suburbs need.

Peak Oil web sites : http://www.fromthewilderness.com/ http://www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net/BreakingNews.html http://www.peakoil.net/ http://www.theoildrum.com/