Energy in the 21st Century

Energy in the 21st Century

I teach math at Desert Mountain High School in Scottsdale, Az. Three of my classes have spent the last three weeks investigating the energy needs of our world and the resources we have to fulfill them. The three classes have worked collaboratively on this project. This article is my summary of the effort of the three classes. The class was evenly divided between those who agree with this assessment and those who think it may be an overstatement of the facts. We recognize that we have no special knowledge or insight into the oil industry, we ask that you consider our ideas and try to improve on them rather than argue them.

Oil at the Beginning of the Century

The 20th century may go down in history as the century of oil. Power and wealth flowed to countries that produced and utilized the energy resident in the fossil fuel. At the beginning of the 21st century, many think that the age of oil is coming to an end while many continue to act as if there will never be an end to oil. We decided to investigate both the supply and rate of consumption of oil to begin to get an idea of how long it might last.

Oil supply is divided into three classifications. The first is Proven Reserves. Essentially, proven reserves are the deposits of oil that are actively producing oil. Unproven Reserves are deposits of oil that range from known to suspected deposits that as yet have not starting producing oil. As such, some of these deposits will probably start producing oil while others might prove to have no oil after all. Undiscovered Reserves are reserves that have not been discovered yet. While it may seem silly to consider an undiscovered resource, oil has followed a trend of discovery that should be considered.

We used data from the Energy Information Administration(EIA), a branch of the Department of Energy. According to EIA, there are approximately 1,237 billion barrels of crude oil in proven reserves. In addition, there are approximately 1987 billion barrels in unproven reserves.

The world consumed approximately 84 million barrels of oil every day, which means that we consume 30.68 billion barrels of oil per year. Over the last several years, world wide growth has been under 1 % per year. However, last year, China, India, and much of industrializing Asia all averaged approximately 5.5% growth in the consumption of crude oil. Based on the current size of those markets, we agreed that the growth in these markets would mean that worldwide consumption of crude oil will average 3% per year over the next 2 to 3 decades.