ExxonMobil has a post making concrete the scale of global energy demand. It mentions the Hebron project off the east coast of Canada:
Like many projects undertaken by the oil and gas industry, Hebron is enormous. It is among the largest engineering projects currently underway anywhere in the world, and when completed will be one of the larger and more complex offshore drilling and production projects our industry has ever pioneered.
It will take five years to build and is not scheduled to start up until 2017. (By contrast, the Pentagon took 18 months to build.) The cost to build Hebron? More than $14 billion.
We expect Hebron to produce oil for three decades, and we are in the process of hiring people who could spend their entire careers working on this one project.
When all is said and done and Hebron comes online, this massive energy project is expected to produce about 700 million barrels of oil.
Remember, that is over the course of 30 years.
Here's the kicker: The amount of oil Hebron will supply over three decades is equivalent to about eight days of current global oil requirements. Not eight years. Not eight months. Eight days.
That should give you some idea about the size of our industry and about what is required to power the global economy. The world will need a lot of projects like Hebron to keep it moving.