I came across a very interesting website today via an article from Les Echos.
This page is about peak oil, the point where half of oil reserves will be used up and according to this source, it should occur around 2015, ie. in less than ten years.
David Strahan, the author of The last oil shock, shows a very interesting interactive map on his website. This represents the world with all oil producing countries.
The countries in red are beyond Peak oil while the countries in green have not been reaching this point yet.
According to Mr. Strahan :
There are currently 98 oil producing countries in the world, of which 64 are thought to have passed their geologically imposed production peak, and of those 60 are in terminal production decline. A few countries such as Iran, Libya, Peru, and Russia are anomalous in that although they are thought to have passed their production peak, their output is growing at the moment.
However they are not expected to regain their previously-established highs. Other post-peak producers may also grow their production temporarily within a long-term downward trend. According to analysis by Energyfiles.com, another 14 countries could peak within the next decade. The numbers given here are a snapshot, and Energyfiles’ forecasts are continuously updated in the light of emerging data.
Source : http://www.lastoilshock.com/map.html
As one can see via the map on the website, countries like Iran or the United States reached peak oil in the 1970s. Marion King Hubbert, the researcher that created the Peak Oil theory (hence also referred to as Hubbert’s theory) wrote in 1956 that the decrease of production should happen in 1970 for the United States, this was the case as the map shows.
I already knew that the decrease of oil production is near, indeed in my Master’s thesis I stated the following :
In fact, most of the oil experts think half of the reserves will be used up by a period ranking between 2015 and 2020. This is indeed a quite small amount of time compared to Mankind’s life. This is why the CEOs of Total and Shell, two of the largest oil companies in the world, think that the peak of production should occur between 2015 and 2020, i.e. in less than 15 years.
Furthermore, we currently discover less oil than we consume and this trend is aggravating as time goes, and it becomes more and more expensive to be extracted and refined.
If you are interested in that very interesting topic, you can read the Data section of this website, which quotes my Master’s thesis part on oil. This should give you more of the data one needs to know.
If you wanted additional data on that, please write me an e-mail or a comment and I will dig through my database or the Internet to write an article with a deeper insight on that subject.
Source :
- Article from Les Echos.
Edited on September 3rd, 2007 to add the thumbnail and some minor corrections.