In today’s society, the car is not only a status symbol: it signifies
mobility, freedom of movement and convenience. However, the
oil we use to power our cars is fossil fuel with a limited life span.
The supply and cost of Crude Oil.
The traditional oil producing areas such as the Middle East have enjoyed easy extraction of the commodity and resource. Also thew same could be be said for
the early days of oil production in the US. The reserves were enormous and the
conditions under which the wells were drilled were undemanding in some places it flowed out of the ground. It was also quite cost effective to establish the supporting infrastructure. Not to mention lax licensing conditions
Surveyors and engineers in the 60s and 70s, found more huge reserves offshore,in
the Gulf of Mexico and then in the North Sea. This made for a different and
more expensive engineering challenge. The cost of establishing and operating
these fields was that much greater. However as the price of crude oil has
increased it has made it economically viable to extract these more difficult,
therefore more expensive, reserves. time and technology has help as with better engineering techniques to extract most of this oil cost effectively how ever it still continues to be contingent on oil being at quite a high trade ed price.
There is an interesting paradox represented by the fact that although we are
extracting oil at a greater and greater rate the actual reserves are actually
increasing as well. It should also be understood that not all of the so-called
reserves are actually recoverable at this point in time.
There are some vast reserves which would be very difficult to extract and as a
consequence very expensive. An example of this would be the oil shale and sands
of Canada. Whilst not denying the size of the reserves, the energy demands of
blasting, transport, crushing, heating etc, together with the safe disposal of
huge quantities of waste material, are large, not to say extremely expensive. roughly Watt for Watt you get out what you put in, some would say a slight loss, this cost has to be recovered from you, the end consumer.
Many oils are not even useful for fuel prodution and end up in plastics or other chemical process. Recent finds in Brazil although huge are difficult to get at and only really meet a small percentage of the demand forcast for the next few years.
