It’s Official, Oil Peak Has Been Reached!

March 2nd, 2006 · No Comments · Business, Middle East

Oil Drum

The oil drum has written an (as ever) intelligent piece on why oil production is peaking now:

This post is for the benefit of those readers whose friends or relatives just spat out their coffee over their morning New York Times in surprise that oil is starting to run out and nobody warned them before now. If you are looking around for more background information, I would like to summarize a series of arguments and analyses that have led me to the view that peak oil is most likely occurring about now, give or take a year or two. My personal coffee-spitting incident occurred about a year ago, and this is some of what I’ve figured out in the meantime.

This is a quick summary of past analyses with links for further detail.

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While no one piece of evidence is conclusive, I find the overall picture here to be suggestive that oil production is close to it’s peak value and is not likely to increase too much more. Whether May 2005 will stand as the highest ever month of production or some month in 2006 or even 2007 rises a little higher is certainly hard to call. However, I would be quite surprised if the world is able to bring enough new production on stream to overcome those high decline rates in existing production for much longer. And with each passing year, it’s only going to get harder to do.

Lots of nice graphs and numbers included to back up the claim. We are in some serious doodoo