The tank isn’t empty

It is taken as an article of faith, thanks largely to a decades old prediction made by M. King Hubbert on American oil production, that the world is in imminent danger of running out of oil. Peak production, the day when oil production begins its irreversible slide, may be less than a decade away, say some experts, and the world economy could collapse overnight in response.

Except that isn’t the truth, argues Robin D. Mills in The Myth of the Oil Crisis: Overcoming the Challenges of Depletion, Geopolitics, and Global Warming. He believes that the world is in little danger of running out of oil, that the world has enough conventional and unconventional sources of oil to last it many decades


The peak oil argument largely stems the prediction made by Hubbert in 1956 that American peak oil production would take place in 1970. The problem with Hubbert’s methodology is that it has only ever been proven correct that one time. His succeeding predictions, including that the world would hit peak oil production in 1995, have been uniformly wrong. That hasn’t stopped his acolytes from continuing to promote the notion that we are in imminent danger of running out of oil.

Mills, a petroleum economics manager for the Emirates National Oil Company in Dubai, argues that peak oil advocates have long underestimated the amount of estimated and proven reserves and that exploration has largely keeping pace with production when necessary. The recent rise in oil prices doesn’t reflect scarcer resources but underinvestment on the supply side and global economic growth on the demand side.

To support his argument Mills carefully surveys the world’s oil producers and analyzes their past, present and predicted future output. Unlike peak oil advocates, Mills generally takes a guardedly optimistic view and argues that many nations have untapped resources that haven’t been exploited for various reasons which include economics, technical and environmental, or that they simply aren’t needed at the moment.

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