This is a deepening post for our original post about oil.
Switzerland and its oil usage
Even though the Swiss are very eco-friendly and, accorind to a survey in 2018, about half of our population wants to become an oil-free county in the next 20 years. But, in Switzerland about half of the energy is produced by oil. So getting completely rid of it wouldn't be easy. 30% of this half is made up of the usage of petroleum fuels like heating oil, and the other 70% are regular fuels like petrol or diesel.
Switzerland imports about 80% of the oil from foreign countries, we are extremely dependent on our suppliers. In 2018 we imported approximitely three tons of oil. The three main suppliers are Nigeria, Lybia and Kazakhstan.
Below you can see the oil usage (in 1'000 barrels per day) in Switzerland in the past 20 years:
In 2018 we used 215 barrels of oil per day, that corresponds to 34'185 litres. Overall, the swiss oil consumption is decreasing. Worldwide oil usage on the other hand, has been increasing in the last years.
What if there is no oil left?
We found this website where you can see the oil that is left on the planet and it got us thinking, what if one day there is no oil left? The website's date is from 2016 so now, four years later, there is even less oil left. As we mentioned above, half of the energy used in our country is produced by oil, so there would be fatal consequences if the world ran out of oil. A few exaples of these consequences are:
- No heating oil, buildings couldn't be heated
- Planes as well as well as petrol-using cars would stand still. No more holidays in far away places
- Various machines couldn't be used anymore - the economy would suffer, factories would have to be closed, people would lose their jobs
- No fuel for tractors - difficult to do agricultural work
A world without oil would probably end in chaos. We would have to come up with new ways to replace oil. There is only a limited amount of oil on our planet. The possibility that one day there will be none left exists. We can only hope that in slowly reducing oil usage today we can prevent a catastrophy in the future.
Sources
info about survey (nau.ch)
suppliers (watson.ch)
statistics (statista.com)
no oil left? (energyfuture.org)
Vocab:
petroleum fuels = Erdölbrennstoffe
agricultural work = Landwirtschaftliche Arbeit
By Seraina Wernli and Anna Meier