The Lost Oil

Oil, the most precious energy resource since the advent of the internal combustion engine, the lifeblood of nearly all of mankind's creations. Prospectors have searched for the last century for this black gold, and after having turned over every last inch of land on this planet in search of it. Now, after every rock has been turned, we fail to find new reserves and this limit has caused a wave of terror in the commodities market since the last decade. Prices of oil are rising, and with it, the price of nearly every other commodity, but is this planet really running out of oil?

To realize the full implications of that statement, one has to realize that only 30% of the earth's surface is land, the other 70% water, meaning that if the concentration of resources is the same on land as under water, there lies more than twice our current assessable reserves of oil and metals under the ocean.

We have only recently developed the technology to develop and extract resourcess from the ocean floor, and by recently I mean think back about 2 years, Gulf of Mexico, BP oil spill. Sure, the whole event was an embarrassment, but the fact that one poorly laid out oil well could leak enough oil to cloud up the entire gulf of Mexico literally speaks volumes about how much oil is out there, under the waves. For those who like hard statics over comparative imagery, a very gloomy estimate puts the worlds oceanic oil reserves at at least 30 trillion barrels, 800 billions of which are within the shores of America, compare that to the 1.4 billion barrels tucked away in Siberia.

The good news dont even end there, there are far more frequent and violent seismic activity occurring under the waves than on land, and while this is a good thing for us humans who live on land, its a great thing for underwater mineral reserves. In the Pacific "Ring of Fire" alone, where several tectonic plates come together to grind under each other, millions of tonnes of iron, nickel, copper, and even gold are being brought near the surface and deposited on the ocean-floor. There are already companies such as Nautilus who are expressing interest in these reserves which could very well hold enough metals to run the world for another century.

As mush as prices are rising, this planet is not going to run out of the black stuff any time soon. There wont be wars over petroleum or any other resource, just a lot of red tape about who gets to develop what, and speaking of red tape, my next post is going to cover one UN treaty that just so happens to get in the way of the development