Witchy Woman

The following is blatantly and unashamedly stolen from a friend's email rants.

Peak Oil is PART of the understanding that at some time in the future the oil will run out. The 'Peak' in peak oil is referring to the highest point of oil production for an oil well or an oil field. Unlike a water well which is refilled every time it rains there is no way to refill an oil well, so there is only a very limited amount of oil in the ground.
Now due to the way oil is produced and the machines that pull it up and the pipes that carry it, it can only be produced at a very limited rate. This means that a well is drilled, then a pump is put on and the oil starts to flow. A couple of decades later somebody with a clipboard and a lot of notes notices that this well has produced less oil this month than it has last month, and the month before, and the month before. This means that the well is past its peak and will never, EVER again hold steady or increase in its production. From that point onward it will be in 'terminal decline' meaning that while it may never run dry, it will fall off to the point of being useless.
This happens with every well, in every field, in every country. In fact back in 1971 it happened here in the US. That was the cause of the big oil shock and big price jumps you may have heard about. The US oil production had been falling for more than a year and then on day the amount we produced could not meet the amount we needed and everybody freaked. On a world wide scale this happened in July 2008, according to OPEC and Saudi Arabia and as you saw by the price of gas last year... everybody freaked.
It is a known and widely accepted fact that on a world wide scale we will never again be able to produce, or match, the amount of oil pumped up from the ground as we had in July 2008. In fact, on a world wide scale, our oil production is already in terminal decline. Oil production will gradually decrease until sometime in 2010 at the rate of about 5% to 7% per year. After 2010 the rate of decline goes into a "free fall" at about 17% to 25%.
"OK." You may think. "But what the hell does that mean to me and mine?" Good question. What it means in the personal scale is that the price of gas and electricity will rise, taking with it the price of food, clothing, and housing. At some point we will no longer have the energy to sustain this disposable lifestyle and we will have to go back to living like the Amish, or as we like to say, communal lifestyle.
Now here is the spooky part. According to the Saudi Arabian government, they peaked last year and they were among the last. There is a saying in Saudi Arabia, "My father rode a camel, I drove a car, my son drives a jet, his son will ride a camel."

Right now the world is using about 82.2 Million Barrels a Day of oil. That right about 3,616,800,000 gallons a day, or about 150,700,000 an hour, or about 2,511,667 gallons per minute, or about, 41,861 gallons per second. In understandable terms, 4 Olympic sized swimming pools every minute. A bar of soap or two is not gunna change much. The basic fact is that all we gotta do is wait a couple of years and oil use will change itself.
I am thinking when we run out of oil, or it becomes to expensive to use, our society is in for some deep shit problems. But thats just me.