Brian Towler
University of Wyoming
Laramie, Wyo.
Peak world oil production rate depends on economics and is unlikely to occur before 2018, and rising oil prices and technological developments may further delay this peak.
When production rate eventually does peak, however, the decline side of the curve will not mirror the growth side as predicted by Hubbert.1 2
Oil has been the number one energy source in the world since the middle of the 20th century. But ever increasing demand has caused its price to spike in recent years and only world economic crises have tempered demand and brought down its price,
Demand and price, however, likely will increase again when the economy recovers. The world still has much oil, and production will continue to meet demand for some time.
Peak oil theory
Peak oil theory grew out of a 1956 paper1 by Marion King Hubbert who was a geologist-geophysicist at Shell Research Lab in Houston.
The theory holds that world oil supply has peaked already or likely will peak soon, thus putting an upward pressure on oil price.
In his 1956 paper, Hubbert proposed that any finite resource, such as oil, gas, coal, or uranium, follows a bell-shaped production curve. At some point, production reaches a peak and begins to decline, and the decline will mirror the rise in production.
The peak production rate and the timing of the peak depend on the total reserves that exist and are discovered in the future. Because the two sides of the bell-shaped curve mirror each other, production will start to decline after half of the world's reserves are produced.
Hubbert's theories have garnered much credibility after he successfully predicted the rise and fall in US oil production. His prediction, however, of world oil production rate peaking in 2000 and falling rapidly after 2000 has not proven true. Eleven years later, world oil production rate continues to rise in accordance with world demand.
His theories still have much support and many expect oil production to peak soon and then fall rapidly. They then expect the world to be starved of energy with resource wars to follow in a struggle for controlling rapidly depleting remaining resources.
Oil is a finite resource and eventually world oil production will peak in the distant future and then run out. But in this article, I will show that the world still has plenty of resources and when production eventually does peak, it will decline less rapidly than Hubbert predicted.
Probably the leading exponent of Hubbert's theories is Ken Deffeyes, a geologist who worked at the Shell Research Lab in the early 1960s as a colleague and protege of Hubbert. Deffeyes published three books that espouse his theories.3-5
His first book in 2001 forecast an imminent start of an oil shortage and dire consequences for the world economy. He forecast that oil production would peak in August 2004.
His second book in 2005 slightly revised the forecast for the world oil production peak to late 2005, and in the preface to the paperback edition (written in 2006), he wrote that Dec, 16, 2005, was the actual date that world oil production peaked. In the preface of the book's 2008 edition, he triumphantly says, "I told you so."
In his third book in 2010, he ignores the fact that world oil production was still rising and continues to insist that production peaked in 2005, and points to the rapid increase in the oil price during the last 6 years.
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