Meeting oil demand a trickly affair

It's surprising that the modern oil industry is just 150 years old and we are already talking about the end of the "age of oil". The year, 1859, when oil was first drilled successfully - in Titusville, Pennsylvania - is like fraction of a second away from our times in terms of the Earth's age.

Only the dodo seems to have survived for a briefer period after man discovered it. But then the dodo was hunted to extinction not out of greed. It became extinct in the late 1680s, almost 170 years before Charles Darwin published his earth-shattering work, The Origin of Species, (incidentally, it was published in 1859, too) and almost three centuries before we realized the importance of biodiversity and the threat of climate change.

To say we have overused oil would be a gross understatement. To say we needed to do so for the benefit of humankind would be an exaggerated overstatement. It took us just one and half century to (almost) exhaust what nature took millions of years to create. We knew long ago that oil contained 83-86 percent carbon yet we continued using it at random, as if there was no end to it. Even when we know almost nothing in this modern world is produced without energy - mostly bad energy as in fossil fuel - we continue not only to overuse everything at our disposal, but also to waste them.