The World at $100 A Barrel

Two years ago in May of 2002, a group of international petroleum specialists met at Uppsala University in Sweden for a two-day conference to discuss the world’s oil supplies. The result was a consensus that global supplies of crude oil will peak as early as 2010 (or earlier) and then start to decline, ushering in an era of soaring energy prices and economic upheaval.

This stands in stark contrast to the projections given by a U.S. government study done two years earlier, which predicted that the peak date would not occur until 2036. Dr. Colin Campbell, author of “The Coming Oil Crisis,” and a retired geologist who helped organize the conference, explained this discrepancy by pointing out that oil companies prefer not to talk about it for fear of upsetting their investors.

The dispute centers on the precise timing of what is variously described as “peak oil” or “the big rollover”? the predicted date when existing oil production, together with new discoveries of crude, can no longer replenish the world’s reserves as quickly as consuming countries are depleting them.

When that day comes, the price of oil will skyrocket to heights never seen before. It’s simply supply and demand economics. It will be a climatic threshold signaling the beginning of the end of the oil era; a small span of time covering only a dozen decades of Homo Sapiens existence.

Seoul Times