Petroleum’s end game, part 3
There’s a lot more riding on the climate debate than pollution like provisioning an adequate energy supply for mid-century. That’s why we need to transition from debating the climate problem and begin taking action.
Parts One and Two of this series are also available on this site.
Indonesia was once part of OPEC, the global petroleum cartel, which means it was a net exporter of petroleum. It produced more than it consumed. Actually, the country left OPEC twice. First in 2009 when it became a net oil importer and most recently in late 2016 when it would not go along with mandatory production cuts to help stabilize world oil prices mandated by OPEC, as reported by Reuters.
Indonesia’s story is at the same time typical and revealing. It was never a big oil producer like Saudi Arabia, Russia, or the US producing only about 1.7 million barrels per day (bpd) at its peak in the mid 1990s. But today production is about half that and declining. Worse, there have been no new oil reserves discovered in over a decade. In oil industry parlance, Indonesia’s older fields matured and then started to die.
It happens. Oil is a limited quantity and it runs out in specific locations and eventually the planet will run out but first there will be shortages and the complexity that goes with them. So, what happened in front of our eyes in…
