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Peak OilSee also: Why Is Peak Oil Such A Serious Problem?, The End of Suburbia (Video), The Power of Community: How Cuba Survived Peak Oil (Video), Why the Global Economy is About to Crash, What To Do About the Upcoming Economic Crash, Arithmetic, Population and Energy (Video). All oil production, when drawn on a graph of production versus time, follows a bell-shaped curve, known as "peak oil". That is, oil production initially increases, then peaks, then inevitably and relentlessly declines. This happens in an individual oil well due to the physical properties of oil and how it is stored undergound. It also happens to the total production summed over many wells in an oil field, over a whole oil production region, a country, and eventually, to the entire world.
Once oil production has peaked (that is, "peak oil" has been reached) there is nothing that can be done to stop the decline in the rate at which the oil can be extracted. It is a matter of the physics of oil (and you can trust me on this, I have a first-class honours degree in physics) — it has nothing to do with economics or how high the price of oil becomes. There are still people in the media who refer to peak oil as being a theory. However, peak oil stopped being a theory in the early 1970s, when the oil production of the United States peaked, and has since then continually declined. You can see this as the green shaded area at the bottom of the graph above. (See here for more). As time marches on, and oil is consumed, and global demand grows, and spare capacity dwindles, the nature of the situation is becoming increasingly apparent—and increasingly well recognised. Here is a quote from ABC TV's Catalyst programme on peak oil, shown in November 2005: Earlier this year, Eric Streitberg asked an extraordinary question at the Australian Petroleum Production and Exploration Association conference. Eric Streitberg: I asked them to put up their hands if they thought that we had reached peak oil. Fifty percent of the people in the audience put up their hand saying that they believe we're at peak oil and these are practicing petroleum industry professionals. In other words, it looks like world oil production (that is, consumption) is about to peak about now, or within a small single-digit number of years from now. And then, it will go into terminal decline. Note that Eric is the Managing Director of an oil company, and he is coming out publicly to say stuff like this, as are many others around this time. I don't think that is going to do their share price much good. Retired and otherwise non-commercially-involved oil scientists and engineers have been talking about peak oil for many years now. But it is quite recent that this kind of information is being preached by currently practicing members of the oil industry, and even by oil companies themselves: Without any press conferences, grand announcements, or hyperbolic advertising campaigns, the Exxon Mobil Corporation, one of the world's largest publicly owned petroleum companies, has quietly joined the ranks of those who are predicting an impending plateau in non-OPEC oil production. Their report, The Outlook for Energy: A 2030 View, forecasts a peak in just five years..... The public should heed the
silent alarm sounded by the ExxonMobil report, which is more credible
than
other predictions for several reasons.
First and foremost is that the source is ExxonMobil. No oil company,
much less one with so much managerial, scientific, and engineering
talent, has ever discussed peak oil production before. Given the
profound implications of this forecast, it must have been published
only after
a thorough review. Below is a graph of world oil discovery (blue), production (green), and demand (red), from Richard Heinberg's Sydney talk in August 2006. The data is sourced from the US Energy Information Administration (EIA), British Petroleum (BP), and ExxonMobil. On this graph, "peak oil" is the top of the green area, occurring around now, with the decline beginning shortly after the year 2010.
And we are seeing this topic discussed in more and more mainstream publications, for example Rolling Stone Magazine. You can read here about why economic growth is so important (to our modern society), and what will happen when it is no longer possible. For peak oil, one of the most convincing pieces of media that I have come across is Matt Savinar's first interview on "Feet to the Fire". The interview is the third segment in this stream, it begins at 1 hour, 09 minutes, and about 50 seconds from the start of the stream. It plays for about 40 minutes, plus an extra 20 minute "bonus" segment that was not part of the original radio broadcast. This interview is rather confronting. Why Is Peak Oil Such A Serious Problem? oil peak production video
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