Let's not forget oil

A recent report in the national press suggested that oil is steadily becoming a scarcer resource and access to it will be the major factor that will cause wars, riots and other political disturbances in the years ahead.

While I have enjoyed reading TheEngineer's Year of Energy articles, I have not noticed an awful lot of coverage of the issue of oil reserves and the potential to extract more from the wells we know about and find those that we don't.

I understand that subjects such as wave power, fusion energy and nuclear energy are important, but I think it is just as vital that we devote resources — both intellectual and financial — to the issue of more effective exploitation of oil and gas.

We hear a lot about the need to 'transform' our economies to run on the green energy sources, or to switch over to nuclear power on a massive scale, but it is often forgotten that this is easier said than done and that the economies of India and China are built on oil just as much as our own.

Those countries will grow off the back of oil and will become ever more important to the world economy, so we should devote plenty of effort to ensuring that the oil economy has a lot of technical and financial effort put its way.

C James

Aldershot

Hants



Thank you for your observations on this subject, Mr James. Our feature examines how the oil and gas industry is attempting to meet the challenge of harvesting the huge fuel reserves beneath the North Pole, while Viewpoint looks at the way BP is using technological advances to enable it to carry on extracting oil and gas in the future, as well as accessing new, undiscovered resources and reserves. We hope this goes some way towards addressing your point — editor.