Great summary.
Petroleum extraction from oil sands is expensive, energy intensive and dirty. Deposits often lie beneath a hundred feet or more of earth, and about two tons of sand has to be mined to produce a barrel of oil. The result of the mining process isn’t the light sweet crude that comes from Saudi Arabia; it’s an extra-heavy oil that requires considerable further processing to yield gasoline and other products. Finally, each barrel of oil leaves behind about 2.5 barrels of murky wastewater, which is retained in vast contaminated ponds near the production site.
In short, Fumento presents an overly simplified and optimistic perspective on the future of petroleum. A more realistic view can be found in “The End of Oil” by Paul Roberts, who begins with the obvious fact that someday we’ll run out of petroleum. Like Fumento, Roberts believes that the world’s petroleum reserves could last a long time. However, he contends that the real petroleum crisis will occur, not when we finally pump and burn the last barrel of oil, but at the point when worldwide production begins to decline.
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