Life offers a window of opportunity for realizing possibilities, for taking action. History is full of songs and sayings about the window of opportunity.. The Romans said carpe diem – Seize the day! The famed Lorenzo di’Medici wrote a delightful quatrain, which goes something like this, if I remember correctly ---

And we have the same basic idea ---  "Go for it!"

Oil geologists also speak of an "oil window," which has to happen if oil is to be produced in the earth. It all starts with porous sentimentary rock which is crammed with organic matter, plankton and algae. This matter falls to the bottom of the ocean or into great rifts where, if covered with more sedimentary layers, the deeper layers are deprived of oxygen. Thus the organic matter does not decay but is turned into something called kerogen, a kind of "proto" or "immature" oil.

The oil window refers to the depth at which the process of turning kerogen into oil can occur – from 6,000-7,000 ft. to 13,000-15,000 ft. At this point our "source rock" (the original rock) will be "cracked" into oil. ("Cracking," apparently, is the term of choice used by petroleum geologists.) At greater depths you would not get oil from the cracking, but gas.

The conditions in which this cracking could occur happened only rarely in the earth’s history. We are talking of a time span of millions of years, mind you – about all the things that had to happen in order for this planet to become habitable for us, and which Peter Ward and Donald Brownlee do such a good job describing in their marvellous book, Rare Earth: Why Complex Life is Uncommon in the Universe. Well, the pressure of the cracking must become so intense that, in order to relieve the pressure, the oil begins migrating into the upper strata so that, eventually, someone from Chevron or Shell Oil could discover it.

There are actually people in the world today who spend time figuring out how many tons of plant matter had to give up the ghost in order for you and me to be able to drive 300 miles on one tank of gas. I think it is about 90 metric tons or so, quite a considerable amount. These are also the same people who are reminding us that the oil window opened just so much, and only once, and once you’ve used up the oil that’s there, there’s no more to be had. At least not as much, and not cheaply.

There’s a mighty cold wind blowing through the oil window these days. Omar Khayyam told us (circa 1050 AD)--- and just think of all the oil he lived on top of! If only he knew!

"The Worldly Hope men set their Hearts upon
Turns Ashes – or it prospers; and anon,
Like Snow upon the Desert’s dusty Face
Lightning a little Hour or two --- is gone."

But I think, somehow, he did.

The Oil Age: Is the End in Sight?

The January 17, 2004, issue of The Economist reported that Royal Dutch Shell – known in the U.S. as Shell Oil –downgraded its reported reserves by nearly four billion barrels of oil, causing ripples of shock in the investment community. The move from proven to probable reserves highlights the "murky" accounting practices of oil companies with respect to their reserves that oil geologists have known about for years.

With world consumption of oil now topping 78 million barrels a day (for the U.S. – 20 million barrels a day) or about 27 billion barrels a year, it has become apparent that even a generous petroleum endowment will run dry in the foreseeable future. The debate on when that future will arrive – when world oil production will "peak" -- has become one of the most important in the world today. The researches of Dr. Colin J. Campbell, the Oxford-educated petroleum geologist, and Dr. Walter Youngquist, Dr. Kenneth Deffeyes, Dr. Richard Duncan, and Dr. Jean Laherrère, -- all of them petroleum geologists, can be accessed on www.peakoil.net, a website of the Association for the Study of Peak Oil & Gas, whose mission it is to "Define and evaluate the world’s endowment of oil and gas;" "Model depletion, taking account of demand, economics and technology;" and to "Raise awareness of the serious consequences for Mankind."

I suspect that very soon the name of M. King Hubbert will become familiar to every literate person. Hubbert was the American geophysicist who, in 1956, predicted that oil production in the lower-48 United States would peak in 1970, give or take a year or two. As it turned out, his prediction was accurate. The new generation of oil geologists uses Hubbert’s insights as they attempt to pinpoint the year of the world peak of oil production.

The peak of U.S. oil discovery occurred in the 1930’s. What Hubbert saw was simple and obvious and yet, perhaps, for that reason easy to overlook: production can only follow discovery. You can produce only from what you have discovered.  Another thing that Hubbert noticed is that oil production, initially slow, speeds up while the well is producing at its maximum rate. But the peak is reached when about half of the oil has been pumped, after which the production rate begins to decline. This "decline from the midpoint" is graphically illustrated in the figures of oil recovered per foot of drilling. In the 1930’s the oil gushed, and about 240 barrels on average could be recovered per foot of drilling. By 1950, this figure had dropped to 40 barrels; in 1981 it had become about 6.9 barrels per foot of drilling.

According to the best estimates of oil geologists, the world endowment of oil is about 2 trillion barrels, of which about half has been pumped so far. Remember --- the last half of the resource will be declining, and for that reason more difficult – and more expensive – to pump.

It looks like the news from the oil front will soon put the lights out on the stage our pygmy politicians are strutting upon. And much else. George Bush Sr. once declared, at some summit or other, that "The American lifestyle is not up for negotiation."

Nature, it seems, has other plans.