Once you understand the role of oil, you cannot walk around or travel anywhere without seeing its massive impact on our lives. Whether it’s the year-round abundance in our grocery stores or it’s the endless traffic jams in every city across the globe, every single day of the year, you see oil’s effect in and on our collective lives.
What we call ‘the economy’ is really nothing more than a measurement of how many resources were extracted, refined, transported, sold and eventually disposed of.
Not one thing we economically measure happens without energy being involved.
Because it can easily be argued that both our technological progress as well as our gross population numbers owe their existence to energy, specifically oil energy, knowing how much we have left is important.
Accordingly, the one thing you’d want the US government's Energy Information Administration (EIA) to do is to put out detailed and credible assessments of future oil supplies.
Unfortunately, the most recent assessment of global oil supplies by the EIA –projected out to the year 2040 — leaves me wondering what the heck is going on over there. Many of their projections just leave me scratching my head in wonder.
The Absurd EIA Projections
Taking it from the top, the EIA is now projecting that the world’s oil supply will steadily march up from current levels of Crude plus Condensate (C+C, hereafter) of 79 Mbd currently to over 99 Mbd by 2040:
(Source)
This is their ‘reference case’ which they consider most likely. There’s also a much higher case and a lower case, but all three cases are dominated by the price of oil. The higher the price, the more we’ll get. While there’s some truth to that, there’s no indication that depletion and tapped-out fields (or regions) play any role in their analysis.
At any rate, I find that straight march upwards to be quite bizarre since the following chart shows what we know about oil production growth since 2005, a period of time when oil prices were quite high and should have, by the EIA’s (magical) thinking, caused the world to produce a lot more oil in response:
What we see in the above chart is that minus the US, the globe has produced exactly the same amount of oil since 2005 despite spending more than $3.5 trillion.
by pinecarr 
