How many times did you hear these words:
Oil? There’s plenty of it. There are countries floating over oil!
Of course it’s just a metaphor but decades hearing the same old metaphor have lead people to think that it’s mostly true.
So my naive question is: what is the total volume of crude oil on Earth? 
BP (formerly known as British Petroleum) has on its website a very detailed Historical data Workbook (1965-2006) that I used to find the answer.
Doing the maths with years of 365 days, I got that our beloved humanity extracted (from 1965 to 2006) “just” 977.448.953.647,0277 barrels of crude oil.
- 1 standard barrel of crude oil = 42 US liquid gallons
- 1 US liquid gallon = 231 cubic inches
- 1 cubic inch = 0.000016387064 cubic metres
therefore
1 standard barrel of crude oil = 0,158987294928 cubic metres
so
977.448.953.647,0277 barrels (1965-2006) // years of 365 days
are equals to
155.401.965.069,65 cubic meters (1965-2006)
that are roughly
155,402 cubic Kilometers
Knowing that:
- the amount of oil drilled during that period (1965-2006) prevails over the previous years;
- crude oil is half gone;
- we shouldn’t think about it like a huge underground lake (it would be geologically unrealistic)
we could multiply the given volume by a factor of four to get the total volume of crude oil on Earth (past, present and future) having a suggestive picture of 622 cubic Kilometers. According to the list of lakes by volume provided by Wikipedia, it would be something larger than Lake Van and smaller than Lake Titicaca (that is the 14th greatest lake of the world).
My little work was done to have a volumetric idea of the oil we have on our planet (the volume it really takes up or that it has taken up is larger, of course) but that IS NOT like a sea: it’s not renewable so we should have cared more about using it.
Last update: 2008-08-13
2 Comments
Hi,
I really enjoyed the post. I got the answer for my question clearly, if the answer is correct. The oil according to this calculation, the crude oil stock will be zero on not less then 150 years.
Arun: I’m pleased to have been helpful though I don’t understand where your calculation of 150 years comes from (it’s far too optimistic). Don’t forget that when a finite resource (like oil) is going to its end, the energy (and money and so forth) required to use it increases quickly… so the year of the end is not important as the year of “no more profits from here” (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EROEI).
If you liked this post, you might be interested in reading another one I wrote on this subject:
http://perassi.org/2008/07/02/local-maximus-of-oil-extraction/