Is there really a fixed supply of oil?

(at any point that I say something incorrect, feel free to point it out to me) There is enough oil right now, somewhere in the Earth, to last for millenia. Correct? Therefore, what really makes the oil supply seem fixed, is that the price being charged now for oil is not high enough to cover the cost of extracting and shipping the oil from the earth to other places. So, if there is enough oil to last for decades in the Earth, over those decades, would more oil not be created beneath the Earth surface for us to draw out again many hundreds of thousands of years down the line? Would the supply not constantly change because of more oil being vreated over that time? I know this is crazy, because we probably wont even last hundreds of thousands of years, but my point is that I need to hear your opinions on this to answer my homeowork question properly. I was given this theory from a person, and now I'm not sure weather I buy it completely or not. Thankyou, and please consider this acrefully. It takes a moment to settle in.Is there really a fixed supply of oil?
The simple answer is ';no.'; The Earth is digesting the biomass from thousands of years ago and producing more oil. As long as there is life on Earth, oil will be naturally made by the Earth. The catch is, it takes thousands of years to synthesize and conditions need to be perfect. Mankind will never extract all of the oil on the planet, we will just get to the point where the supply can no longer meet demand. This video will help answer your oil question.





http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cwNgNyiXPLk%26amp;feature=PlayList%26amp;p=7E8A774DA8435EEB%26amp;index=16Is there really a fixed supply of oil?
While there is life on earth...


OK. However, very specific geologic processes are involved with trapping biomass in the formations, which are not present in human history. So there is no evidence to support the conclusion given that oil will be produced in future. Sorry, no proof for your statement. Report Abuse

I once worked for an oil company and know about oil reserves.There is a 200 year supply of oil in known reserves at current rates of use.There is a 2500 year supply of natural gas.There is more oil in the rocks (oil shale) in Colorado and Utah than in the entire Middle East.Any shortages or spikes in prices is manipulated by market forces and is the result of pure greed.There is enough oil and natural gas for us to have very inexpensive fuel.
No, your very first statement is wrong. There is not enough oil on the entire earth to last for millennia. There are in total about 2.8 trillion barrels of oil in the world still in the ground, and we use 85,000,000 barrels of oil a day. Do the math - that's about 20 years left, if we don't increase our usage.





Oil is not created by a geological process. It's created by biological processes that take millions of years, and we're using it so fast that the natural replenishment can't possibly keep up.
More oil is not going to be ';created.'; It's a finite amount. Unless you're willing to wait another million years or so.





At the end of 2008, world proven crude oil reserves stood at 1,295,085,000,000 barrels, of which 1,027,085,000,000 barrels, or 79.3 per cent, was in OPEC Member Countries.





As of 2005, eighty-four million barrels of oil are consumed in the world each day, a quarter of which is consumed by the U.S.





And I'll let you do the math.
you are so sexy whenr you type sense
We have only been using petroleum in any appreciative scale for less than 100 years.





We have already used more of it than is left, and our need for it grows every day. It has taken 100 million years to produce that. What is left isn't even in the hundreds of years worth at our present pace of consumption and growth... it's less than a century's worth. And that's not long.





Google or youtube ';Peak Oil'; to find out the situation.





China is growing, GDP-wise, at a pace that we cannot begin to comprehend; as is their need for oil.





We do need to begin building our alternatives NOW.





But; that said; cap %26amp; tax STILL sucks.
First, the oil companies explore, drill, transport and refine the resource. But since oil was first needed for industrial use, over half of the supplies have burned or become economically unrecoverable .


Second, it is this combustion and exhaust which is driving the climate changes, rising seas, melting ice. The oil as a natural resource is very old, it is not a process of decades, but millennia. Oil is a result of organic material like animals plants algae and forests, which have been buried in sediments and the volatile components trapped by impermeable layers of usually sedimentary rock. These deposits of oil are often thousands of feet below the present surface. The scale of time to bury a surface layer to a mile deep is calculable. It is on the order of hundred of thousands of years to millions of years. These resources once used are irreplaceable.
1. Since the entire world is dependent on fossil fuels (Petroleum, coal and natural gas). Since China and India, the world's most populous countries, are using more and more as they industrialize. Since no more fossil fuels are being created because the populations of plants and animals and the environmental conditions that existed millions of years ago don't exist anymore. Since the world's human population is exploding and creating more demand for fossil fuels.





2. We'd better find alternatives. It's best to develop and begin implimenting an alternative energy policy before we need it. There will be problems to work out. Most importantly, what we create today will be the foundation for a technology that can be improved on over the years. If we don't start a program now that can be improved on, when fossil fuels begin to disappear and we most need alternative forms of energy, we'll just be taking our baby steps with a new technology. This is not a good place to be.