Why We’ll Never Run Out of Oil
2nd June 2012
Remember the term “peak oil”? Whatever happened to it?
Down the memory hole! ‘Never mind!’
So what the heck happened? It’s no great mystery. As supplies tightened and prices rose, producers were motivated to find new sources and develop new technologies. When you hear that only X trillion barrels of “recoverable reserves” of oil exist, remember: The term does not refer to all the oil that there is. It refers to those reserves that are neither too costly to tap at present, nor off-limits because of government policy. Both of those factors can change.
And how. In just the past six years, North Dakota has shot to the No. 2 domestic source of oil, thanks to improved horizontal drilling techniques that have tapped the Bakken and Three Forks fields. Thanks to the oil rush the population of Williston, N.D., has roughly doubled. Unemployment is 1 percent—with 3,000 jobs are still open—and average pay has shot up from $32,000 to $80,000. North Dakota’s oil boom also has been made possible by a new technology, fracking (short for hydraulic fracturing). Fracking has drawn criticism from environmentalists, but it works.