Peak energy: promise or peril?

The notion that we’re running out of fossil fuel is gaining support in some unexpected quarters. But is peak energy good or bad news for the climate?

Will we continue to use fossil fuels to the detriment of our planet and the human population? Or can we clean up our act in time to avoid calamitous change? That’s the dilemma the world currently faces, yet in spite of efforts to transition to alterative energy sources, projections show that annual fossil fuel demand is likely to increase 45 per cent by 2030.

But those projections make an important assumption


“It’s not enough to sit back and say, ‘Oh, because we’re going to run out of fossil fuels we don’t have to worry about the climate.’ But [this] does seem to indicate that the more fossil fuel rich scenarios used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have little likelihood of being realized,” says Robert Brecha, a physicist at the University of Dayton, Ohio.

The concept of fossil fuels peaking first came about in 1956, when an American oil-company geophysicist named M. King Hubbert correctly predicted that US oil production would climax in the early 1970s1. Hubbert had noted that production of any particular oil field followed a roughly bell-shaped curve: production increased until about half of all oil had been recovered from the field, at which point it went into abrupt decline. Hubbert simply extrapolated the curve to production numbers for the United States as a whole. Since then, others have suggested that global production of oil