365 Days of Climate Awareness 88 – Peak Oil
Too much demand causes oil prices to rise to an unsustainable level, leading to the oil market’s collapse.
This is another topic, like eutrophication, which is not specifically part of the global warming problem, but it is of direct importance to society and to our use of petroleum. Peak oil theory states that, since petroleum is a finite resource, while humanity is not in imminent danger of running out of recoverable oil, the remaining oil will be increasingly hard to obtain, requiring more time and resources, becoming a less efficient process which is increasingly not beneficial to the economy or humanity.
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In 1956 Marion King Hubbert, a geologist for Shell Oil, was commissioned to report on future oil recovery in the United States. After a statistical study of all available oil field data, Hubbert developed a bell-curve model for conventional crude oil production predicting a peak in the early 1970’s. In fact conventional oil—wells drilled on land, without the application of advanced recovery techniques—peaked slightly before Hubbert’s prediction, topping out at 9.5 million barrels per day (mmbd). Similarly detailed information is not available for oil fields in other countries—Saudi Arabia is not about to give out detailed information about production and reserves, which would compromise its geopolitical strength, for example—so similarly detailed predictions cannot be made for the planet as a whole.
Furthermore, unconventional oil production has increasingly come to dominate the market, with offshore and fracked wells leading to new peaks in production, notably in the United States (which currently leads the world in crude oil production at slightly over 10.5 mmbd). So what to make of a theory which was correct on its initial terms—predicting maximum onshore oil production in the United States—but avoided predictions for the markets which developed later, and have led to later, higher production?
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