River of Oil Flowing
The driving force behind the BP oil spill (as documented in Popular Mechanics Oct. 2010) was basically greed and speed. Major and minor oil companies are compelled to produce a river of oil to meet demand and make money.
That is correct, every day a river of oil flows out of the earth. How big is the river?
People on planet earth are at present using close to 85 million barrels of oil per day. That is equal to a medium-sized river of oil flowing night and day.
85 million barrels is 477,239,583 cubic feet of oil. If you divide that by the 86,400 seconds in a day you get 5,524 cubic feet per second! This flow is equal to that along the famous Snake River in Idaho, USA (at certain times of the year), or one of many rivers draining the western slopes of the Sierra Nevada in California, USA. There is enough oil flowing that you could raft down it; sort of like black water rafting!
How does this amount compare with the Gulf Oil spill? Flow estimates are reporting up to 20,000 barrels per day spewing out of the broken riser. How much is that? It turns out to be around 1.3 cubic feet per second, which is a trickle in comparison to the above river of oil, although it doesn’t seem like that to the local area inhabitants.
So, people are draining a river of oil from the interior of the earth, night and day. How long can this river keep flowing before the oil runs out? That is a good, but complicated, question.
It appears that the freely accessible oil on the earth is about halfway used up. This point is called peak oil. Some people say it is already past; others claim it is years away.
The amount of oil used is forecast to increase as time goes on. If peak oil is here now, the river will not be able to get much larger. If peak oil is a ways off, volume will grow even larger until this black river finally shrinks to the size of a stream.
Either way, as the song goes, that old man river of oil keeps on flowing along.
For more details on peak oil, check: http://www.evsroll.com/Peak_Oil_Myth.html
