British Petroleum published their world energy stats several months ago, and I figured I'd raise the issue now....

Pay attention to the R/P ratio, which is the ratio of remaining reserves to annual production. Stated another way, the R/P ratio is the number of years reserves will last at current (end of 2001) production levels. Many country's R/P-ratio is larger than the regional R/P-ratio, but many also have a smaller ratio. The regional ratio may assume that within a given region, shortages can be made up by increasing regional international trade.

At current production levels world oil will last 40yrs, but by 2010 there will be no oil left in Europe, by 2016 there will be no oil left in North America, by 2018 there will be no oil left in Asia-Pacific nations, etc. By 2016 OPEC countries will control nearly 100 percent of the world's remaining oil reserves.

Tar sand operations in Alberta, Canada have recently been scaled back due to ratification of the Kyoto Accord, and similar lawsuits and environmental regulations have terminated shale oil projects in Australia. Under modest environmental regulations, tar sands and shale oil may therefore not be considered "recoverable" reserves.

About a year ago I did a similar projection of oil reserves, instead of using the R/P ratio, I used a "trend line" of linearly-increasing oil consumption in each region, based on consumption trends of the past couple decades. This may be more realistic, and resulted in an estimate that world oil reserves will run dry by the year 2032 AD.

Even more complicated is the issue of "Peak Oil", since production tends to follow a "bell curve". More specifically, you can never get all the recoverable oil out, and as it nears depletion production will drop off exponentially, with the flow slowing to a trickle. Once the peak of the bell curve has been reached, no matter how hard you try, no matter how many wells you drill, you cannot increase production -- it will inexorably fall.

The statistics produced by British Petroleum showing the R/P ratio symbolically represent the "Brick Wall", when all production simply stops. This is not realistic, and the "Peak" will obviously occur several years before. Exponential decreases are astonishingly severe in the first few years after the Peak, with production falling off anywhere from 1% - 10% annually. Unfortunately oil companies will likely have invested in enough equipment to produce oil at-or-above the Peak levels, and will not be able to reduce their financing expenses. Oil prices will therefore soar proportionally to the falling production. Meanwhile world oil cartels will be stating remaining oil reserves of hundreds of millions of barrels.

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Region:
Proved reserves(billion barrels) : Share of total : R/P ratio

Total North America
63.9 6.1% 13.5
Total S. & Cent. America
96.0 9.1% 38.8
Total Europe
18.7 1.8% 7.8
Total Former Soviet Union
65.4 6.2% 21.1
Total Middle East
685.6 65.3% 86.8
Total Africa
76.7 7.3% 27.4
Total Asia Pacific
43.8 4.2% 15.6

Of which:

OECD#
85.0 8.1% 11.5
OPEC
818.8 78.0% 76.6
Non-OPEC‡
165.8 15.8% 13.3

TOTAL WORLD
1050.0 100.0% 40.3

Symbols:

†Less than 0.05.
w Less than 0.05%
‡ Excludes Former Soviet Union
#1981 excludes Central European members
n/a not available

Notes:

Proved reserves of oil - Generally taken to be those quantities that geological and engineering information indicates with reasonable certainty can be recovered in the future from known reserves under existing conditions.

Reserves/Production (R/P) ratio – If the reserves remaining at the end of any year are divided by the production in that year, the result is the length of time that those remaining reserves would last if production were to continue at that level.

Source of data - With the exception of Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan, the estimates contained in this table are those published by the Oil and Gas Journal, plus an estimate of natural gas liquids for USA and Canada. Reserves of shale oil and oil sands are not included.

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I think the NATO allies should transfer much of its military spending, some $700 billion or more annually, to developing a sustainable alternative to petroleum, namely vast floating rafts of ocean biomass for ethanol production.

Build those ocean rafts close to home, geographically isolated from the scurge of the middle east by the two huge bodies of water, the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. Then we can protect those rafts much more easily.

Refer to the links under the section entitled "Renewable Energy Transportation" on my Starship Generations website.