belief, fact & thermodynamics: part 1

what do you believe in?
what is a fact?

these two questions i asked myself in regard to Peak Oil. do i believe in peak oil? my answer was yes. is Peak Oil a fact? i had to think a little bit...then my answer: yes peak oil is a fact.

how do i know this?
A common definition of a fact is something that can be proven.
Any proof requires context, or a language in which to be rendered and therefore proven. Aside from the deeper philosophical arguments as to whether or not anything can really be proven anyway; i will choose the conventional and current agreed upon framework for "proof" which is physical science.

so here is my base assumption; that we can measure our data, assuming the data is correct, and make specific statements based on these facts, because they are measureable.

Oil is measureable by volume for area. thus we have barrels.
It can be measured in other ways too, the energy/heat content of a barrel is expressed in Jouls.

Put simply peak oil is the point at which the most amount of oil will be extracted in a certain time frame. We will say this time frame is a year for ease. So the year in which peak oil occurs will be the point during which the most barrels were ever sucked out of the ground.

OK, how do we know how much oil is in the ground? We don't really. We only know what we have discovered so far, and whever else we have looked but not found any. This is of course based on another assumption that oil is a prehistoric fluid that is essentially not replaceable. There are people who argue this point about oil, but we don't need to go there, to me it is self-evident, and a solid assumption for our proof.

There is no way to know truly how much oil is underground. But the closest we can come, with what we know so far, is to draw a map of the globe and mark every single spot that has been explored. This then would need to be interfaced with what geologists know about where oil is found. Then we could come up with a decent assumption. Particularly if many places on the planet have already been explored. Admittedly I have never actually seen this map, but my studies have indicated that much of the globe has indeed been explored. We are talking the great majority of the surface area of the planet that is not under water, and even much of it under the water. This is another assumption, that we are not going to find too much more oil. This statement is supported by most geologists, a general estimate as to what is left seems to be about 10%. That is ten percent of recoverable oil is still unfound. The main evidence here has been the declining rate of oil discoveries since the 1960s. It is not like we haven't been looking either. The last few years have seen the amount of significant discoveries dwindle to almost nothing. So far then we are assumming that we know where most of the accessible oil is and that it is a finite resource.

What are the numbers?

I will use generalities here the specifics will follow in another post listing sources.

We have used approx. 950 billion barrels out of a total of 1900-2000 billion barrels.

This seems to be right around the half way point. Peak Oil indeed.