Peak Oil – Part I: A Change is Gonna Come

4/12/06 – Note: Since writing the following essay, I’ve read additional credible sources which dismiss “peak oil” as a flawed notion. Some experts believe we will not encounter serious problems with regard to oil supplies before the end of this century or even later. Ironically, that may make oil even more of a problem. As Jeffery Sachs’s pointed out in a recent address to the fourth biennial State of the Planet conference at Columbia University, continued ready availability of oil only gives us more opportunity to damage the earth’s ecological systems through fossil fuel consumption. As Sachs put it, “We’re going to be using lots of fossil fuels and putting an enormous amount of carbon in the atmosphere with all of the consequences of anthropogenic climate change, so we have to find a way to de-carbonize our energy.”

That said, I believe this two part essay still gives an adequately balanced overview of the peak oil discusssion. If I feel otherwise in the future I’ll post revisions or a new essay.

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Image source: dieoff.org/reprinted from Scientific American, March 1998, by Colin J. Campbell and Jean H. Laherrère

“Peak oil” is fast becoming one of the most talked about topics on the Net. Given that oil is a finite resource, the idea is that the amount of oil we can extract worldwide will peak at some point, after which we will see a decline in oil production. This is not just a guess. In 1956 a geophysicist for Shell oil named M. King Hubbert created a model, ran some calculations, and predicted peak oil for U.S production would occur between 1965 and 1970. What happened? It peaked in 1970.