What is the consensus on when Peak Oil will occur?
Peak oil is the point in time when the maximum rate of global petroleum extraction is reached, after which the rate of production enters terminal decline.
8 Answers
2006.
![]()
That's from the International Energy Association as of 2010. Note that the question is about petroleum, not all fossil fuels, and the difference is important.
That said, the IEA predicts a plateau of the consumption vs demand ratio for roughly the next 20-25 years as governments slowly and haltingly start to wean their economies off of oil. So there shouldn't be a huge price shock, just slowly increasing prices.
Source: IEA acknowledges peak oil
That's from the International Energy Association as of 2010. Note that the question is about petroleum, not all fossil fuels, and the difference is important.
That said, the IEA predicts a plateau of the consumption vs demand ratio for roughly the next 20-25 years as governments slowly and haltingly start to wean their economies off of oil. So there shouldn't be a huge price shock, just slowly increasing prices.
Source: IEA acknowledges peak oil
I cannot speak to any "concensus" (of whom?) BUT the International Energy Agency which is charged with monitoring global energy supplies and reporting primarily to consuming nations stated in early 2011 that production of conventional oil peaked in 2006 and that production of conventional oil is declining at the rate of 4% per year.
So far, energy alternatives, tar sands, deepwater etc., conservation and a damper on demand due to economic constraints is maintaining adequate energy supplies.
1) However, that 4% decline is EVERY year, year after year. Conservation improvements are one time gains.
2) Canadian oil sands production is about 2 million barrels per day and has taken many decades and much government money to attain. Even if production can be doubled by a herculean effort, production is very unlikely ever to triple or quadruple becasue of ther amount of natural gas and water the processes require.
3) Even a miracle new source - may be such as algae - is likely years away from production matching demand of 90 million barrels per day. As far as i know, there is still no commercial production on any scale any where in the world.
4) Governments are calling for growth growth growth to pay off massive private and sovereign debts. Any big increase in global economic growth is likely to hit energy contraints and price increases that choke off that economic growth.
read more on my website:
http://www.dennisonberwic
So far, energy alternatives, tar sands, deepwater etc., conservation and a damper on demand due to economic constraints is maintaining adequate energy supplies.
1) However, that 4% decline is EVERY year, year after year. Conservation improvements are one time gains.
2) Canadian oil sands production is about 2 million barrels per day and has taken many decades and much government money to attain. Even if production can be doubled by a herculean effort, production is very unlikely ever to triple or quadruple becasue of ther amount of natural gas and water the processes require.
3) Even a miracle new source - may be such as algae - is likely years away from production matching demand of 90 million barrels per day. As far as i know, there is still no commercial production on any scale any where in the world.
4) Governments are calling for growth growth growth to pay off massive private and sovereign debts. Any big increase in global economic growth is likely to hit energy contraints and price increases that choke off that economic growth.
read more on my website:
http://www.dennisonberwic
This question needs clarifying. There is not one but two peaks - peak of production (which everyone here seems to be talking about) and peak of discovery.
The rate of discovery is the number of new oil fields discovered each year in comparison with previous years. The peak here has already occurred - it happened in the 70s or even earlier. This means that the numbers of new oil fields discovered has been going down each year. The last major oil field to be discovered was the North Sea. We are now on the downward-sloping side of the bell-curve. This is the reason why Big Oil corporations invest into expensive oil - tar sands, deep-water drilling, etc.
The rate of production is the number of units of oil extracted from existing fields each year in comparison with previous years. Naturally, this is correlated to the above-mentioned rate of discovery and is lagging behind it 20 or so years.
Another extremely important variable is the rate of extraction from individual fields. And here I would like to disagree with Anon User on July 23 2010 who suggests that:
This is very unlikely! 30-40 years ago the major consumers of oil were America, Europe, Japan and Australia. Since then, as the Third World countries began to evolve into Developing Economies their consumption went through the roof. Europe, the US and the rest of the big boys, however, also continued to increase their consumption steadily and all that combined with a peak in the rate of discovery meant that there was roughly the same number of oil fields but there were many more consumers, hence rate of extraction was in fact increased!
It is very likely that we have already reached the peak of production but we are not aware of it because the rate of extraction has also increased - meaning there is less and less oil but it is being extracted faster. This creates the illusion that supply can meet demand under normal conditions. Instead of following the classic bell-shaped curve we are artificially increasing the peak and shortening the tail - we will not walk down an easy path to the beach but rather fall from a steep cliff.
Earth's upper crust is finite. Hydrocarbons (oil, gas, coal) have formed over two brief periods of extreme global warming hundreds of millions of years ago and as a resource are virtually non-renewable. All of them a finite. We will never run out of them completely because there will be a point beyond which it will not make commercial sense to use them.
Now, I have noticed that some of the other answers suggest that anything can be commercially viable as long as prices of substitutes increase enough. I believe this to be wrong! Stop thinking in terms of dollars, euros, yen and pounds and you will see that it is energy that is the real currency. If a process has a negative net energy yield - meaning that its input energy is higher than its output energy (NEY) - this process makes no sense as you might as well use the input energy for consumption in the first place rather than lose some of it in a meaningless process. An example of such process is the hydrogen fuel cell(1).
Briefly on alternatives:
Nuclear is not the answer as both uranium and plutonium are finite. If we were to convert our whole energy production to nuclear we would run out of raw materials in 10-15 years.
Liquefied coal, liquefied natural gas, tar sands and deep-water drilling get an undeserved amount of publicity in the press as they are merely the garnish on our plate of energy sources. Big Oil (Shell, BP, Exxon, Conoco, Chevron, Total) which leads the way in these fields due to its investment in technology is not the biggest player in conventional oil production(2).
Wind and sun light may be the answer but then you get the problems of intermittency of production and loss in transportation.
Bio-fuels are a joke. Arable land is finite - the corn you make will either be used for food or biofuel. Hungry people want bread more than they want to cruise down town in their Escalate.
Nuclear fusion could provide a long-term solution but the technology is unlikely to be ready by the time it is needed.
Realistically, there is no energy source that is capable of sustaining the current population of the planet. We have bred uncontrollably as the hardships of our existence have been cushioned by oil and its sub-products. Population has been kept above the equilibrium level for decades. Another peak, another crash...
@ Dimitry Lukashov : May I kindly ask you to comment on my answer? I have read some of your answers on similar topics and would like to know what your view of Peak Oil is in the long run. Surely you will agree that conventional economic models of supply and demand cannot solve a problem posed by a finite resource with no real substitutes?
(1) Hydrogen is not widely available on our planet, therefore its production is from water and it involves separating it from oxygen through the use of electricity. The electrical energy used to separate the two elements is more than the energy that can be extracted from the hydrogen produced.
(2)http://www.petrostrate
The rate of discovery is the number of new oil fields discovered each year in comparison with previous years. The peak here has already occurred - it happened in the 70s or even earlier. This means that the numbers of new oil fields discovered has been going down each year. The last major oil field to be discovered was the North Sea. We are now on the downward-sloping side of the bell-curve. This is the reason why Big Oil corporations invest into expensive oil - tar sands, deep-water drilling, etc.
The rate of production is the number of units of oil extracted from existing fields each year in comparison with previous years. Naturally, this is correlated to the above-mentioned rate of discovery and is lagging behind it 20 or so years.
Another extremely important variable is the rate of extraction from individual fields. And here I would like to disagree with Anon User on July 23 2010 who suggests that:
producers have seen this coming and chosen to lock in at steady lower rates rather than push fields to their limit.
This is very unlikely! 30-40 years ago the major consumers of oil were America, Europe, Japan and Australia. Since then, as the Third World countries began to evolve into Developing Economies their consumption went through the roof. Europe, the US and the rest of the big boys, however, also continued to increase their consumption steadily and all that combined with a peak in the rate of discovery meant that there was roughly the same number of oil fields but there were many more consumers, hence rate of extraction was in fact increased!
It is very likely that we have already reached the peak of production but we are not aware of it because the rate of extraction has also increased - meaning there is less and less oil but it is being extracted faster. This creates the illusion that supply can meet demand under normal conditions. Instead of following the classic bell-shaped curve we are artificially increasing the peak and shortening the tail - we will not walk down an easy path to the beach but rather fall from a steep cliff.
Earth's upper crust is finite. Hydrocarbons (oil, gas, coal) have formed over two brief periods of extreme global warming hundreds of millions of years ago and as a resource are virtually non-renewable. All of them a finite. We will never run out of them completely because there will be a point beyond which it will not make commercial sense to use them.
Now, I have noticed that some of the other answers suggest that anything can be commercially viable as long as prices of substitutes increase enough. I believe this to be wrong! Stop thinking in terms of dollars, euros, yen and pounds and you will see that it is energy that is the real currency. If a process has a negative net energy yield - meaning that its input energy is higher than its output energy (NEY) - this process makes no sense as you might as well use the input energy for consumption in the first place rather than lose some of it in a meaningless process. An example of such process is the hydrogen fuel cell(1).
Briefly on alternatives:
Nuclear is not the answer as both uranium and plutonium are finite. If we were to convert our whole energy production to nuclear we would run out of raw materials in 10-15 years.
Liquefied coal, liquefied natural gas, tar sands and deep-water drilling get an undeserved amount of publicity in the press as they are merely the garnish on our plate of energy sources. Big Oil (Shell, BP, Exxon, Conoco, Chevron, Total) which leads the way in these fields due to its investment in technology is not the biggest player in conventional oil production(2).
Wind and sun light may be the answer but then you get the problems of intermittency of production and loss in transportation.
Bio-fuels are a joke. Arable land is finite - the corn you make will either be used for food or biofuel. Hungry people want bread more than they want to cruise down town in their Escalate.
Nuclear fusion could provide a long-term solution but the technology is unlikely to be ready by the time it is needed.
Realistically, there is no energy source that is capable of sustaining the current population of the planet. We have bred uncontrollably as the hardships of our existence have been cushioned by oil and its sub-products. Population has been kept above the equilibrium level for decades. Another peak, another crash...
@ Dimitry Lukashov : May I kindly ask you to comment on my answer? I have read some of your answers on similar topics and would like to know what your view of Peak Oil is in the long run. Surely you will agree that conventional economic models of supply and demand cannot solve a problem posed by a finite resource with no real substitutes?
(1) Hydrogen is not widely available on our planet, therefore its production is from water and it involves separating it from oxygen through the use of electricity. The electrical energy used to separate the two elements is more than the energy that can be extracted from the hydrogen produced.
(2)http://www.petrostrate
The problem with predicting Peak Oil is that every player has a motivation to a) lie about the extent of their reserves (in either direction) and/or b) to exceed ideal extraction rates, thus making less oil available from the reserve than would otherwise be available.
The one prediction that's safe: When we hit peak oil, we won't know it's happened until we're looking back on it. That's because of the aforementioned motivations to lie about the real conditions under the ground.
The BP incident, in fact, may be the trigger that causes Peak Oil, due to changes in the investment and insurance landscape for drilling and maintaining wells.
The one prediction that's safe: When we hit peak oil, we won't know it's happened until we're looking back on it. That's because of the aforementioned motivations to lie about the real conditions under the ground.
The BP incident, in fact, may be the trigger that causes Peak Oil, due to changes in the investment and insurance landscape for drilling and maintaining wells.
There is really no consensus on when Peak Oil will occur.
"Optimistic estimations of peak production forecast the global decline will begin by 2020 or later, and assume major investments in alternatives will occur before a crisis... Pessimistic predictions of future oil production operate on the thesis that either the peak has already occurred, that oil production is on the cusp of the peak, or that it will occur shortly."
- From Wikipedia's nice article about peak oil: http://en.wikipedia.org/w
"Optimistic estimations of peak production forecast the global decline will begin by 2020 or later, and assume major investments in alternatives will occur before a crisis... Pessimistic predictions of future oil production operate on the thesis that either the peak has already occurred, that oil production is on the cusp of the peak, or that it will occur shortly."
- From Wikipedia's nice article about peak oil: http://en.wikipedia.org/w
