By Roger Howard, International Herald Tribune
At a time of rapid price increases, our natural resources seem ever more precious and their future more uncertain. In particular, the arguments of advocates of "peak oil," who assert that global oil production has now climaxed and will start to decline, appear increasingly plausible.
Frankly, finding 2 experts who agree on oil reserves is impossible.
Fortunately, however, a coming centenary puts their claims into a timely and fitting perspective. Almost 100 years ago - on May 26, 1908 - British geologists, working in a remote Persian wilderness, first discovered oil in the Middle East...
May 26 is the day. I didn't see it coming. Happy 100th Birthday, ME Oil!
Skeptical though we should be about all such claims and statistics, there are several reasons why they should allow us to take heart about the future of oil. If in the years ahead there is a serious shortage of crude - leading to even more dramatic price rises than those of recent years - it is more likely to occur because of a disproportionate increase in demand rather than any diminution of supply.
To some extent, this is simply because there are still many areas of great promise that, for one reason or another, have remained largely unexplored. For example, whole areas of Russia and Iraq, particularly the latter country's vast desert regions, have been completely untouched by the latest sophisticated drilling techniques.
But the fundamental, underlying cause for optimism is the rate at which technology and scientific skills are advancing, thereby allowing existing reserves to be kept on tap for longer than anyone ever predicted and for new sources to be discovered in places where, not long ago, they were considered unreachable.
Of course, such relative optimism is no excuse for complacency. In an age of dramatic population growth and rapid industrialization in the developing world, every finite resource is necessarily precious. We must all urge our governments to sponsor scientific research into the development of more environmentally friendly fuels to replace those that are oil-based.
But let's take heart: The great pioneers who discovered Middle East oil a century ago would have been the first not to take expert opinion as the gospel truth.
Roger Howard is the author, most recently, of "The Oil Hunters: Exploration and Espionage in the Middle East 1880-1939"