Pretty good article in Foreign Affairs on Saudi Arabia and Oil.

If you're interested in this kind of thing, there's a lot of information you probably don't know.


It's a long article though, not your typical fluff piece. I'd forgotten about Foreign Affairs, they've been publishing for a long time, it's a very mainstream source of analysis that has good people writing for them on occasion.

A few corrections need to be made, that article is from 2002, and a lot has changed since then. The supposedly huge caspian oil fields aren't huge. The legendary Saudi excess capacity now appears to have very real limits, and the top oil analysts now are largely agreed on the fact that world oil production has either peaked or is close to peaking.

Also, Chinese oil consumption, along with Indian oil consumption, have both grown far faster than anticipated. Do the math, it's not very complicated.

How does this relate the web? Datacenters eat up monstrous amounts of energy. A typical large datacenter takes the energy of a small town to run it. So maybe the web is not going to be quite as permanent as we all would like to think. Just a thought, don't throw away those good old books.

Recent energy studies by google and others show that if prices for electricity rise substantially, the cost to power a server will exceed the cost of the server, given a 3 year lifespan. And the stuff is still getting hotter and more power hungry.

Or: why I don't believe the web is what many netizens think it is. It's a blip in human history, nothing more. It won't go away, but it will become more of a luxury as time passes.
Back to top