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Oil today is not cheap; the average person can say they pay twenty dollars for six gallons of gas. So why are gas prices so high? They are so high because gas is a fossil fuel, which means we use more of it then the earth naturally produces. This means we well eventually run out of oil wither it be in thirty years or a hundred. So this is a problem, and which is going to be a huge crisis when it comes. Most of the world runs of oil. Just think how you get to work, go to school, go anywhere you use gas. A geologist named Marion King Hubbert came up with the bell shaped curve prediction. The U.S. was the leading country for producing oil. Hubbert predicted the trajectory of oil discover in the U.S. was going to be a classic bell-shaped curve, for the decades from 1910 to1970 Using the history of discoveries in 1950, along with what was already known about consumption; he tired to predict the second bell-shape curve. Some geologists think that we have come to the peak of the second bell-shape curve for oil in Saudi Arabia. But it is almost impossible to predict when we well completely run out of oil because the numbers are so inaccurate for how much we really have left. As of right now geologist think we have 2.2 trillion barrels of oil left on earth, and we’re using it up at the rate of about 25 billion barrels a year. That means we only have 40 to 50 years left of oil at the same increasing rate which is a pretty big deal. Like what happened back in 1973 and 1979 when the OPEC countries took advantage of the supply shortage. People went into instant panic and despair for the future and the way it would go, and mile long lines at gas stations. “An estimate was published in 1998 in Scientific American. It predicts that we will have worldwide maximum in oil production just about now, around the middle of the decade 2000-2010.”
That was just back in 1973 Imagine what would happen if we ran out today. People could lose their jobs; stores could go out of business. Most shipping to stores is done by tractor trailers, which use diesel fuel, so there would be no way for stores to get more materials. No jet fuel for plans there would be almost no means of travel except for trains. It could possible even start a world depression. So what are we going to do about this up coming problem? We should defiantly not just sit around and wait for the next generation to worry about it because nobody knows if this problem will make it to the next generation.
Oil is made by rocks full of organic materials that sink deep into the earth where it is heated and turned into oil. The oil that sinks to low over cooks and turns into natural gas. The oil that doesn’t sink quite far enough is called shale oil which is “unborn oil.” People have spent millions of dollars in this shale oil trying to turn it into fuel, by strip mining, crushing, and heating the rocks into a liquid. This process will always be energy-negative, which means that we will have to put more energy into it, then we will get out.
Some people think that replenishing our oil reserves through deep ocean exploration