Researchers say the Earth may never completely run out of oil because there are many reserves in hard-to-reach places.
For hundreds of millions of years, oil accumulated in deposits deep underground, accumulating over eons as plant and animal remains sank into the ground, covered by layers of sand, marsh and rock. Heat and pressure slowly turn them into liquid form. About 165 years ago, humans began exploiting this natural resource to produce plastic, petroleum, asphalt and many other products at a rate faster than it could be replenished, according to Live Science.
According to researchers, the Earth will never completely run out of oil because some of the oil is located in hard-to-reach places like Antarctica or at such great depths that it cannot be quantified, let alone exploited. David MacDonald, emeritus professor of petroleum geology at the University of Aberdeen, UK, said that because tectonic plates are largely responsible for the location of oil fields, researchers understand them quite well.
The development of ocean basins creates suitable conditions for rapid burial of plant and animal material, while the movement of the Earth’s crust provides the heat and pressure to convert that material into petroleum. Subduction and rifting can create basins where oil accumulates. As a result, oil wells are more likely to be found in some areas than others.
Globally, the amount of oil remaining that can be extracted is about 1.6 trillion barrels, according to Rystad Energy’s 2023 survey. In addition, there are oil fields that humans have not yet discovered. That’s a vague number, although the US Geological Survey once estimated the amount of undiscovered oil to be about 565 billion barrels in 2012. The answer to the question of when humans will use up all the oil they can extract The waterfall is very complicated.
For decades, industry experts have predicted there will be enough oil remaining for about 50 years, based on known reserves. This number will not change much due to the way it is calculated. The number of years until oil depletion is equal to the current known reserves divided by annual global demand. Estimates of the number of reserves increase because people always find new oil fields, but the time remaining does not change much because people use up new oil just as fast as they are discovered.
Kevin Book, managing director of ClearView, a research firm in Washington, DC that tracks energy trends, said that artificial intelligence will make it easier to find new reserves and that evolving technology will contribute. Helps get oil out of the ground more easily. That could increase estimates of total recoverable oil reserves. As the world seeks to reduce fossil fuel use, thanks to the shift to electric vehicles, demand will certainly stabilize. The International Energy Agency predicts oil use will peak in 2030 and decline after that, meaning people will have enough oil to last longer than the predicted 50 years.