Xyrus

Airlines Will Profit No Matter What

Current best geophysical estimates of total world oil reserves including tar sands and oil shale is 3.74 trillion barrels of oil. The easily extractable crude is less than a third of that.

But if you want use your magical figures, let's say there is 13 trillion barrels of oil. A barrel of oil is 84% carbon, and most of a barrel is used for generating fuels. So a barrel of oil is roughly equivalent to about 105 kg (210 lbs) of CO2 production per barrel.

Now using you're magic 13 trillion barrel number, burning it all would release about 1.37x10^15 kg of CO2 into the atmosphere. Dividing by the volume of the earth's atmosphere, that gives us an increase in atmospheric carbon of 5.3x10-4 kg/m^3.

That doesn't sound so bad? The total mass of the atmosphere is about 5.2x10^18 kg. So you've jacked up the CO2 concentration from .03% to 3%. Not so bad still? That's toxic, as in prolong exposure can kill you, as well as most forms of surface dwelling life. Not to mention our planet would be a boiling sauna. Given the carbon cycle is about 150 years and our consumption rate, we'd pretty much guarantee our own extinction, along with the other unfortunate critters who happen to exist at that time.

But fortunately we don't have that much oil, so the damage we can cause from oil is limited. At our current consumption rate (and rate of increase), IF we can extract all the oil, we are looking at 70 years best case. If everyone ramps up to US levels, you can shave another couple decades off that. The easy stuff will be gone in the next 20 or 30 years.

Coal is a whole different (and uglier) matter.

~X~