Our futurist collegue Mark Safford has written a new article for the site, Out of Oil.

The article suggests the opposite of the title, which makes it a provocative think piece. Mark’s claim is that when both conventional and nonconventional sources of oil are taken into account, the potential supply is really very large. Nonconventional supplies include deep water oil, tar sands, shale, and liquified coal. As Mark explains, it could be that not running out of oil is a bigger problem than the wells running dry.

These large supplies, though expensive and environmentally costly to develop, would, if developed, contribute hugely to global warming. But in order to avoid changing our energy paradigm, we might just try to go down this unfortunate road.