When will the oil run out?
Given my recent coverage of the oil industry, found this piece by Guardian’s George Monbiot especially fascinating.
Excerpt: When will the oil run out?
George Monbiot puts the question to Fatih Birol, chief economist of the International Energy Agency - and is both astonished and alarmed by the answer
So burn this into your mind: between 2007 and 2008 the IEA radically changed its assessment. Until this year’s report, the agency mocked people who said that oil supplies might peak. In the foreword to a book it published in 2005, its executive director, Claude Mandil, dismissed those who warned of this event as “doomsayers”. “The IEA has long maintained that none of this is a cause for concern,” he wrote. “Hydrocarbon resources around the world are abundant and will easily fuel the world through its transition to a sustainable energy future.” In its 2007 World Energy Outlook, the IEA predicted a rate of decline in output from the world’s existing oilfields of 3.7% a year. This, it said, presented a short-term challenge, with the possibility of a temporary supply crunch in 2015, but with sufficient investment any shortfall could be covered. But the new report, published last month, carried a very different message: a projected rate of decline of 6.7%, which means a much greater gap to fill.
More importantly, in the 2008 report the IEA suggests for the first time that world petroleum supplies might hit the buffers. “Although global oil production in total is not expected to peak before 2030, production of conventional oil … is projected to level off towards the end of the projection period.” These bland words reveal a major shift. Never before has one of the IEA’s energy outlooks forecast the peaking or plateauing of the world’s conventional oil production (which is what we mean when we talk about peak oil).
