Increasingly economic doomsayers are warning that "the world is running out of oil," and in fact we have already passed peak annual oil production.

     Their forecast: Ever-higher oil prices and food prices, electricity brownouts and blackouts, the end of the automobile and the suburbs, and even the collapse of western civilization. Some pundits are even calling for the U.S. to launch a global "oil war" to seize remaining, dwindling supplies.

     Absolute nonsense says Princetown Geologist Ken Dreffeys in his Reason article "Peak Oil Panic."

     Dreffeys points that that doomsayers have been predicting the end of oil for over 150 years. For example, an 1855 ad for Kier's Rock Oil, a patent medicine containing petroleum, urged customers to buy before "this wonderful product is depleted from Nature's laboratory."

     In 1919, David White of the U.S. Geological Survey predicted that world oil production would peak in 9 years.

     Then, in 1970, the Club of Rome in their report "The Limits to Growth," warned that "all known oil reserves would be entirely consumed in just 31 years."

     What makes such predictions superficially credible is that oil supplies are reported in terms of "proven reserves." For over 70 years, those reserves have been estimated to be a 20-30 year supply.

     The confusion occurs because "proven reserves" only refers to known oil supplies, economically recoverable with current technology, at current prices. Of course, new oil supplies are discovered all of the time, technology is continually improving, and prices are continually changing.

     So how much oil does the earth have left? Dreffeys reports that while no one knows for sure, reasonable estimates by geologists (as opposed to political hacks) now range from 3.2 to 4 trillion barrels – enough to last at least 100 years. That gives us plenty of time to develop solar power, oil shale, coal gasification, hydrogen, atomic energy, and other new sources of power we can't even imagine today.

     While, "running out of oil" is still a problem for the far future, that doesn't mean we can stop worrying about oil crises.

     Unfortunately, most of the world's known oil supplies are under the control of authoritarian and often hostile governments, like Russia, Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, and Iran, who might decide for political reasons to cut off the west.

     The best solution says Dreffey's is not a global oil war, which could end up destroying the very resources we are trying to control, but more free markets and free trade, which creates more competition and new sources of energy.

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