Guest Speaker: Laird Thompson

Today in class, Laird Thomspon came to talk to us about Oil- A History and a Future. It was really interesting because he presented us with facts that the common person doesn't know or ever think about oil. He had a good overall point in his lecture, since we as a society are so disconnected from oil, since 2/3 of our oil is imported from other countries, we don't think about how wasteful using this resource as our main source for fuel is. At the very best, 60-70 percent of oil is recovered from an oil well; however, most cases are only as good as 10-15 percent. As expensive and extensive the damage is when oiling, 10-15 percent is a small percentage to actually get from what is there. If we think about it, it has become such a limited resource, that we are extremely dependent upon, and we can only extract 50 percent, at best, of the oil thats actually there. There are alot of dangers and accidents associated with oil and extracting it but we aren't as aware because it doesnt occur in our country as much. Blowouts cause fires and can create lakes of oil that are extremely damaging to the surrounding environment. Laird Thompson talked about how in the '70's we imported only one third of our oil, and now we import two thirds forty years later. We are definitely an overconsuming and heavily dependent society on oil... in the U.S. in 2005, we used 21,930,000 barrels of oil a day. Laird talked about ways that we can reduce some of our oil consumption though... by using synthetic oil in our cars, it lasts longer by almost 10 times that of normal oil! Which is an incentive for people to use because you save money. Overall, it was really interesting to learn about something i use everyday but rarely think about. Its eye opening, I worry about the limited resource and the rate at which we consume it, but i think nothing about where it comes from. That isnt the way to bring about change. If oil runs out, what is our future?