Word: peak
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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World oil production is about to reach a peak and go into its final decline. For years, a handful of petroleum geologists, including me, have been predicting peak oil before 2007, but in an era of cheap oil, few people listened. Lately, several major oil companies seem to have got the message. One of Chevron's ads says the world is currently burning 2 bbl. of oil for every barrel of new oil discovered. ExxonMobil says 1987 was the last year that we found more oil worldwide than we burned. Shell reports that it will expand its Canadian oil-sands...
...technology cannot eliminate the difficulty Hubbert identified: the rate of producing oil depends on the fraction of oil that has not yet been produced. In other words, the fewer the fish in the pond, the harder it is to catch one. Peak production occurs at the halfway point. Based on the available data about new oil fields, there are 2,013 billion bbl. of total producible oil. Adding up the oil produced from the birth of the industry until today, we will reach the dreaded 1,006.5-billion-bbl. halfway mark late this year. For two years, I've been...
...Peak Oil" theory fits nicely on a cocktail napkin. Its curve looks like this: Colonel Edwin Drake starts pumping crude in Pennsylvania in 1859. We've been pumping faster and faster ever since. Sooner or later, on this finite planet of ours, it just has to run out. U.S. production peaked in the 1970s. Global production will soon be on the downside of the same dismal curve...
...sense of national emergency. That crisis receded, thanks in part to conservation and investments in energy efficiency and in part to the worldwide recession the oil shocks helped trigger. As a result, a barrel of oil costs 30% less today, in inflation-adjusted dollars, than it did at its peak in 1981. This is not the first time the world has run out of oil. Yergin says it's the fifth or sixth...
...coast of Florida for drilling, which congressional Republicans have been pushing for, is a relatively short-term fix. And the more oil that is removed, the more expensive the cost of extracting the remaining oil becomes. At some point--possibly as early as 2010--production will therefore reach a peak, though not necessarily a sharp one, and then gradually start to decline. "The problem," says Simmons, "is that the global economy and the U.S. economy are structured on the assumption that the oil supply will only increase...