Numbers In Perspective

The world consumes almost a hundred million barrels of oil every day. That’s a big number, one that is hard to wrap your head around. Its easier to fathom when you have a visual reference, like a football stadium. Cowboy Stadium has an internal volume of 104 million cubic feet. If you do some quick math that works out to around 778 million gallons, or 18.5 million barrels of oil. So we use five a bit more than five Cowboy Stadiums worth of oil every day.
As the rest of the stadiums are smaller than Cowboy, I will assume that every stadium has a combined capacity of 500 million barrels. Henceforth I declare that five hundred million barrels of oil be declared one NFL unit.
Here is the thing. We have done a pretty good job mapping the earth. We have found most of the large oil deposits. The three NFL field discovered offshore of Guyana is the biggest find in years. And that is exciting. And it sounds like a lot of oil. And kind of is, except for the fact that its total production will only be enough to supply the planet for two weeks. When you look at it like that it starts to be troubling. Every year we are discovering less and less. The amount that we add to the global reserve every year is only a fraction now of what we consume. Is 2015 around six NFL’s worth was discovered compared to the SIXTY that was consumed. It means that we are increasingly dependent on existing fields. And the largest of those are in the hands of some of the least friendly countries. Saudi Arabi, Iran, Russia, and Venezuela. The US and Canada have the reserves to be energy independent from the middle east. However Europe and Asia do not. OPEC currently has their largest market share since 1975. That should scare people. That much power gives them an absurd amount of price control. Instead of dropping production to stay rich, they bullied the market to the point where they have control of it again. Time will only tell how they choose to abuse it.