Kenneth Piers wrote:
> Speaking of depleting petroleum resources, the Jan 2001 Atlantic Monthly
> has an essay by Jonathan Rauch (The New Old Economy: Oil, Computers, and
> Reinventing the Earth) in which he claims that we are not in danger of
> running out of oil. Through adoption of new economy technology
> (3Dseismic imaging, Directional drilling, "smart" drill bits, computers,
> etc.) we are now finding oil more successfully, at a higher rate and
> more cheaply than we were 20 years ago. Knowledge, not oil, limits the
> amount of oil we find. So, he says, by the time we move to a new energy
> economy (hydrogen, fuel cell, photovoltaic, whatever...) there is still
> likely to be large amounts of oil left in the ground unused.
> Paradoxically, the more oil we remove from the ground the more oil we
> find, says Rauch. This sounds very much like the cornucopian worldviews
> propounded by the likes of Julian Simon, Herman Kahn, and Calvin Beisner
> . Is there any legitimacy to these arguments?
The total volume of oil, natural gas, and coal in the earth is less
than 1.1 x 10^21 m^3 - that being the volume of the earth itself. Obviously
that bound can be imprioved considerably. This is
simply a way of pointing out the elementary fact that our supply of these
resources is limited - i.e., finite - and that we'll run out of them
sometime. Of course the difficult question is, "When?" But rhetoric like
"the more oil we remove from the ground the more oil we find" whose primary
effect is to lull people into thinking that we'll never run out, is
irresponsible.
Shalom,
George
George L. Murphy
http://web.raex.com/~gmurphy/
"The Science-Theology Interface"
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