Oil and doomsday

Recently, I provided an estimate of the amount of oil that was formed in the Earth—about 18 trillion barrels.  It's always good to tackle these kinds of problems from different angles, and before using the composition of the atmosphere to do the calculation, I had planned to re-purpose the doomsday argument.  It seems much better suited to this type of problem.  After all, there is a finite amount of oil—or, rather, a finite number of barrels of oil—that we are drawing from.

However, before we are able to apply the doomsday argument, we need to know how many barrels of oil have already been consumed. Using data from Energy Trends Insider, it appears that approximately 1.4 trillion barrels have been produced in modern history.  That being said, reliable verifications of this estimate are hard to find.


Using the doomsday argument, we find that we can be 94% confident that there are at most 16.6 trillion barrels of oil remaining, given that we have already consumed 1.4 trillion barrels.