New findings on peak oil timing and impacts to be presented at Houston Conference$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'O')n Wednesday night at this week's Houston Oil Conference, Aage Figenschou will report on the changing date of Peak Oil as predicted by the IFP, the French Petroleum Institute. He says that in 2001 IFP predicted oil would peak in 2020. But in 2006, IFP said the year would be 2015; and in June of 2007, they had moved the peak year forward to 2010.
But more important than the date predicted for peak are the dates when impacts will be felt and the date mitigation steps are taken, say Conference organizers. Many energy analysts believe that $80 oil is creating impacts right now, and that mitigation steps are being taken very slowly, if at all.
"In the context of world oil," Hirsch says, "relatively small percentage changes are hugely meaningful." He notes that "a 1% change in current world oil production equates to over 800,000 barrels per day (bpd), which represents a huge volume." To save that level of consumption through increases in the efficiency of the world's light vehicle fleet, he says, would require more than a decade, assuming the implementation of a crash program.
His new study has resulted in three scenarios for mitigation of Peak Oil impacts:
1) Best Case Scenario - where maximum world oil production is followed by a multi-year plateau before the onset of a monatomic decline rate of 2-5% per year.
2) A Middling Case - where world oil production abruptly reaches a maximum, after which it drops into a long-term, 2-5% annual decline; and finally ...
3) A Worst Case, where the sharp peak of the Middling Case is degraded by oil exporters withholding product, leading to world oil shortages growing more rapidly than 2-5% per year, creating the most dire world economic impacts.








