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Record W2972206558 · doi:10.21083/surg.v11i0.5225

The finiteness of crude oil: Are we running out?

2019· article· en· W2972206558 on OpenAlex
Conor Smith

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

affAt least one author lists a Canadian institution in the pinned OpenAlex snapshot.
venuePublished in a venue whose home country is Canada.

Bibliographic record

VenueSURG Journal · 2019
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldEnergy
TopicGlobal Energy and Sustainability Research
Canadian institutionsUniversity of Guelph
Fundersnot available
KeywordsScarcityCrude oilResource depletionPeak oilResource (disambiguation)Natural resource economicsSign (mathematics)Natural resourceRealmEconomicsComputer sciencePetroleum engineeringMicroeconomicsMathematicsClimate changeEngineeringPolitical scienceEcologyLaw

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Oil is a controversial natural resource. One aspect of its controversial nature takes the form of periodic expressions of fear at the prospect of the depletion of this energy source, often referred to as Peak Oil Theory. Julian Simon was among the first to challenge the increasing scarcity scenario and argued that global oil stocks are increasing as a result of anthropogenic activity. He presented evidence that, since the 1860s, oil prices had been generally decreasing. Bjørn Lomborg set out to challenge Simon’s finding, and ultimately ended up siding with Simon, concluding that crude oil stocks are increasing and that there is no sign that the world will soon “run out” of this finite resource. This paper updates the earlier work by Simon and Lomborg to see if the trends that they documented have changed since their research was published. Updated data are presented on oil prices, stocks, and extraction rates. These updated data suggest that most of Simon and Lomborg’s findings still hold. The analysis provided in this report concludes that the depletion of oil stocks is not of utmost concern, and that continuous technological innovation allows for greater output per unit of crude oil consumed, thus essentially increasing the availability of crude oil, and giving new meaning to the term “finite” in the realm of natural resources. Of course, future alternatives are important to discuss, as issues associated with oil dependency remain relevant. But fears of running out of this resource seem to be unjustified.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.001
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.942
Threshold uncertainty score0.477

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.025
GPT teacher head0.292
Teacher spread0.267 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it