AAAS ScienceNow: Is peak oil already here (if you don’t count OPEC’s supply)?
Drill baby drill my foot. A lot of science journalists who cover energy issues have probably gone through an infatuation stage, and then break-up, with a seductive actor: Peak Oil. It appeals to any reporter trying to cover a beat where numbers and natural (that is, based on reality and science) processes are important. Plus it’s geology.
In my case the crush came and left years ago, triggered by the first oil crisis in the 70s and discovery of one M. King Hubbert and “Hubbert’s pimple,” a rising line on a graph that turned around and went back down. It was part of a phenomonally persuasive analysis of US oil pumping history decades ago. It foretold a similar global collision with finite resources. But I got over it, seeing that prices and demand, plus oil industry ingenuity, kept finding more of the stuff.
Well! All this to bring attention to veteran Science magazine reporter Richard Kerr and his story, filed late last week, with the arresting headline Peak Oil Production May Already Be Here.
It has a big caveat – that OPEC’s production may well continue to rise. But, by a small margin, production from non-OPEC nations is larger. And OPEC may choose to pump only as much as it needs to make money, but not so much that it would cause prices to fall. So, the article’s sources tend to observe, the conventional oil now hitting the market may be about as much as we’ll ever see.
There is other fuel out there. Natural gas can be converted (the green in the ExxonMobil forecast above, which Kerr has in his story), and Canadian tar sands are making a blip. But regular old crude oil coming up in a pipe, outside OPEC, looks like it’s hit the wall, the article suggests.
Hard to know what exactly to make of it. It has none of the apocalyptic suddenness of a lot of Peak Oil fulminating one sees at some bloggy websites. But the politics of energy are going to bring the world’s great powers to even more serious diplomatic and economic conflict, it looks like, even without worry over global warming.
- Charlie Petit
