The myth about running out of oil
Oil is called black gold. That is a cliché. In fact, oil production requires practically the same effort as gold mining.
What about oil gushers and happy businessmen trying to catch glossy brown oil streams on their faces? That is also true. But that is how only several percent of oil is produced, as naturally oil fields do not represent underground lakes, rivers or streams, like water. Oil saturates with porous earth layers. If you take an oil-bearing rock, you will see that it looks like a brown stone. Oil doesn't stream or even drop from it. An oil gusher or a seepage oil spring is quite a rare view, that occurs when oil is naturally pressed out of porous layers into breakings or special sumps by drafting from surrounding layers.
How is oil produced?
Mostly oil is produced using high water or gas pressure. Thus, we get oil water emulsion due to the fact that water doesn't cut back oil. Sometimes the amount of water is tenfold bigger than the amount of oil. Then oil should be knocked down. This is called oil dehydration. Or salts should be purged away — oil desalting.
That is the way oil is extracted from the depth of maximum 5 km. This method allows extracting from 30 to 70 % of oil from the oil bed. As for Russia this figure makes up 30—40%. The rest of oil (up to 80%) remains underground. That is why there is no point in believing the scary rumors, that oil will last for 30, 50 or 100 years, and than we will face severe energy shortage. All these rumors are based on the fact that oil makes up about a half of nowadays energy sources.
How long will oil last?
Speaking precisely, oil will last for a definite period provided that the technology of oil production doesn't change, but the latter is constantly perfecting itself. Besides despite the importance of oil its origin is still not quite clear. Earlier oil was considered to be of biological origin, like many types of coal: plankton, which has always constituted the major part of the Earth biomass, rotted and under definite conditions it became oil. It can be found surrounded by sand and sedimentary rocks for the same reason as bones of dinosaurs. Nowadays many pundits repute that oil (at least part of it) appeared much earlier during geological processes and then during biological ones. That is because nowadays the amount of oil explored is so high that it cannot be explained through the process of plankton rotting. Besides, there a lot of natural gas explored, which amount is also hard to explain taking into consideration the biological theory. Thus, there is no point in fearing the imminent energy collapse.
Certainly we need only profitable oil reserves, meaning energetic profitability and not the economic one. Marginal profitability means that less energy is spent on oil production, transportation and refinery, than is gained during oil burning.
Oil in human history
Oil has been used in agriculture for ages, since the sixth millennium BC. Asphalt is one of oil products. Five thousand years ago it was used in Mesopotamia and Egypt as a binding and waterproof agent as well as sand and lime. It was used for making mastic, which in its turn was used for brick and stone constructions, dams, moorings, roads. Thus, asphalt is an old invention. Oil was even used in medicine and military art. There are several descriptions of burning of enemy ships and forts using so called ‘fiery arrows' and ‘fire pots'.
Everyone knows what an ‘everburning lamp' is. So, these lamps were filled with burning oil, which was a mixture of refined oil and plant oil. Then monopolism flourished. In the 18th century merchant Nabatov was the only supplier of refined oil for cathedrals and monasteries. The everburning lamp seemed a miracle, because at those times people in Russian capitals Moscow and St. Petersburg used candles, and people in province simply burnt splinters.
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