Found this[1] now, which gives a ballpark of 20-80k barrels/y which can vary quite a bit depending on the guesstimates of undiscovered reserves. Since we produce 80-100M barrels/y, we’re drinking from the basin about 1000x the rate that it replenishes. Or slightly worse, because we’re slurping up the yummy and easily accessible parts, whereas formation occurs everywhere. Still, the 1e6 estimate seems orders of magnitude too high (to my surprise as well).
Again, this is only for crude oil, and there are certainly more factors at play.
1: https://earthscience.stackexchange.com/questions/571/how-muc...
(Also, as a reply points out, there's thoughts that time periods after the Jurassic epoch, if not some point earlier in the mid-to-late Cretaceous, may be much less "fertile" in petroleum and coal-producing raw elements and that for the most part new "production" by "nature" has been "stopped" and we've long just been mining further and further back in time. Which is to suggest there is no real, meaningful replacement rate at all with which to discuss.)
Given the timescales involved, I know I'm far more inclined towards pessimism that any discussion on replacement rate with respect to human lifetimes, especially on an "annual" basis rather than cumulative across the human epoch, is ignoring the forest for some statistically insignificant trees.
I was just curious about the numbers, mostly because media refuses to share anything more than the most simplistic data. For instance, if we can say that we drank 500k years or natural production in 1y, that is more meaningful (to me).
Per day...
>we’re drinking from the basin about 1000x the rate that it replenishes
Try half a million times faster.
Oh shit. You’re totally right.
> Try half a million times faster.
Yep. At least it’s better to have a number than nothing, even if it’s +-1 OOM. It’s pretty wild to imagine using up 500k years of fuel production in only a single year.
While googling around, found another interesting metric: ratio of proven reserves to production rate, ie how much longer can we sustain given current consumption and no new developments. That number has increased over the decades, and sits around ~50 years for both oil and nat gas and ~100+ years for coal.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reserves-to-production_ratio
