Modeling the Depletion of the World's Oil Reserves in Different Case Scenarios

The usage of Oil as an energy source has transformed human life. Oil has been the driving force of technological advances and prosperity. Nevertheless, dependency on Oil has reached a critical point. Most geologists now agree that world’s Oil production has passed its peak, meaning that Oil reserves will no longer increase, but rather decrease. It is possible to employ mathematical modeling to predict the future of Oil. In this work, we attempt to predict the exhaustion of the world’s Oil reserves in two scenarios. With this in mind, we devised a linear model for World’s Oil consumption based on consumption growth trends of past years. We hypothesized that forecasting world’s Oil consumption enables us to predict the exhaustion of world’s Oil reserves by continuously subtracting the calculated world’s Oil consumption of every year from the world’s Oil reserves estimates at the beginning of the each year respectively, departing from actual data of earlier years. Thus, we elaborated two models for the future of Oil reserves. In the realistic model we assume that Oil consumption keeps increasing. In the optimistic model where we assume that world Oil consumption became stable in 2012. The world’s Oil reserves are exhausted faster in the realistic scenario. Nevertheless, both scenarios place Oil depletion within forty years from now. This will cause severe energy shortages. We concluded that if this problem is not acted upon soon, it will lead to an economic meltdown.