Assuming World population growth rate of 1.167% :How many years worth of World petroleum oil reserves are left

Question

Assuming World population growth rate of 1.167% : How many years worth of World petroleum oil reserves are left?

World poulation growth 1.167% per annum is a figure that I obtained online

Please provide your sources or weblinks.

Answer 1

You seem to be assuming that both population growth rates and oil consumption rates are constant and will continue to be constant. The latter would require, for example, that the price elasticity of demand for oil is zero, which is an absurdity (will people buy just as much oil no matter what the price is?) Since both of these are false, it'll be hard to make a flat-line forecast that bears any resemblance to reality.

P.S.. this is the same sort of logical error that Paul Ehrlich made when he lost his famous bet with Julian Simon.

Answer 2

No way to tell just from population growth rate. You need to know how many of those people are driving cars. And how much mileage those cars get. And what other things is oil used for? Aircraft? Electricity generation? Ships? Trains? Lawn mowers? Plastics manufacturing? How many people use those products. There are plenty of people in the world today who do not use ANY of those things, and many more who only use a small part of that. And how much oil is left in the world. We don't know any of that. But the general opinion is that we have 100 years of oil left. That is just a guess though, nobody really knows.

Answer 3

When we run out of oil is tied to consumption, not population growth (though more people does raise demand to various degrees).

There is a great book out by Paul Roberts called "The End of Oil: On the Edge of a Perilous New World" that is well written and very insightful (see link below).

Roberts points out "With the combined appetites of North America, Europe, Japan and now rapidly-growing China and India, oil demand is rising fast: each year, daily consumpton climbs by nearly 2 million barrels. Consumption is rising so fast that oil companies must discover a new billion-barrel oil field every 2 weeks--or the equivalent of a new North Sea every 18 months. What's now clear, however, that this pace of consumption is outpacing production."

If Roberts' forecasts are accurate, the ready supply of oil as we know it today will begin to end sometime in the 2050s.

Answer 4

Depends. How much oil reserves are there? How much new oil will be drilled or discovered? How many of the 1.167% will be using the oil? What other forms of energy will be utilized in what kind of industries and vehicles? How many people will drive SUVs and how many will drive hybrids? How many will drive at all? How much of that population growth will happen in industrialized countries? When will the Iraq War end? How many countries will start to cut their energy usage? Etc. Etc. Etc.

In other words, this is an impossible question to really answer.

Answer 5

It is estimated that the world's reserves are 1200 billion barrels of crude oil. We use about 30 billion barrels of crude oil a year. There are plenty of other oil but it's hard to extract, etc.
Btw, energy consumption is better counted on the number of people using the amount of energy industrialized nations do rather then total population size.
Edit.
Consumption.
http://www.scaruffi.com/politics/oil.html
Total supplies.
http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/international/reserves.html

oh yea, a little bit of memorabilia: OPEC awarded production quotes depending on total supplies, and overnight the countries increased their total supplies in order to be allowed to sell more oil. A lot of oil fields are now being reduced in size estimate, by this and other reasons. I read about it surfing for the links.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/4681935.stm

Answer 6

The truth is stranger than fiction, but changes will happen, without you worrying about the future of oil reserves.
Maybe by that time, we will be using more of solar, water, wind and nuclear energy. And who knows, maybe another Einstein type of a scientist will emerge to serve mankind into utilizing and harnessing electromagnetic forces to create, maybe anti-gravitational vehicles and power grids without using oil but probabably Deuterium which several countries in the world has more than enough supplies to energize civilizations for several generations.

Answer 7

100 years. h