It's really hard to imagine the scale at which we currently produce oil. In total we produce an average of 80.6 million barrels per day. This doesn't sound like

It's really hard to imagine the scale at which we currently produce oil. In total we produce an average of 80.6 million barrels per day. This doesn't sound like a lot at first but consider that there are 159 liters of oil in a single barrel. When you work this out, it means that we are producing 1.7 liters of crude oil per person, for every man/woman/child on this Earth, per day - every day. Had to double check my math there, because that sounds so absurd. But it's correct! So to visualize that quantity imagine every single man, woman, and child on this entire Earth took a 1.7L beaker (about 5 cans of coke) full of oil, and emptied it out onto the ground. That's how much oil we produce, each and every day. Just stupefying! The problem this reveals is that oil will only be valuable in the longrun if some technology is developed that requires just stupefyingly large quantities of oil. Otherwise, the supply is just far too high. And a catch is that even if this new technology is developed, it's difficult to imagine any usage where 12 billion liters of crude oil per day would not have a massive environmental impact, one way or the other. I would not go long on oil, unless you think it will continue to be used as a primary source of energy generation decades from now.