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Exclusive: At current rates of consumption, the U.S. has at least two centuries of oil, report says
Predictions that the U.S. and the world would run out of fossil fuels go back decades, and these predictions have so far turned out to be wrong. A new report shows the U.S. has 227 of oil, 130 years of gas, and 485 years of coal.
justthenews.com
Predictions that the U.S. and the world would run out of fossil fuels go back decades, and these predictions have so far turned out to be wrong. A new report shows the U.S. has 227 of oil, 130 years of gas, and 485 years of coal.
or years, activists argued for an energy transition away from fossil fuels because, they said, we were hitting “peak oil,” the point at which we can no longer produce oil because there’s little left in the ground or it’s too expensive to recover.
In 2023, the U.S. produced nearly 13 million barrels per day, more than any other nation in history. Predictions that the U.S. and the world would run out of oil go back decades, and these predictions have so far turned out to be wrong.
Tom Pyle, president of the Institute for Energy Research (IER), a free market think tank focusing on energy, told Just the News that anti-fossil fuel activists latched onto “peak oil” to push for alternatives, and with the U.S. leading the world’s production, their rhetoric has evolved.
“First, they said, ‘We don't have the resources. We're big consumers, but we don't have the energy. So we have to get off of the resource.' Then it became evident and clear that that was not the case,” Pyle said.
In 2011, IER produced its first North American Energy Inventory.
“It was really for the purpose of shattering this myth of energy scarcity. To my knowledge, prior to that, nobody had taken the effort to compile, using government data …. the amount of energy that we have in North America,” Pyle said.
In that 2011 report, Pyle stated: “Thanks to new and continuing innovations in exploration and production technology, there’s every reason to believe that today’s estimates of reserves are only a fraction of what will be produced and delivered tomorrow.”
The statement turned out to be accurate. The Shale Revolution, which combined technologies in horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing, made available large deposits of previously unrecoverable oil throughout the U.S.
The IER’s 2024 North American Energy Inventory update shows that North America has 1.66 trillion barrels of technically recoverable resources, and at current rates of consumption, the report calculates that it would take 227 years to deplete it all.
