Australia already on the ‘downside’ of Peak Oil

Australia has already peaked as an oil producer, MGSM Professor John Mathews said today. But the continued emphasis on fossil fuels – attempts at discovery and further infrastructure investment – mean that Australian companies are missing out on important business opportunities in renewable energies and biofuels.

Professor Mathews drew attention to the disastrous state of Australia’s balance of payments, with oil imports now costing $10 billion per year and accounting for no less than 60 percent of Australia’s BoP deficit.
The plunging deficit is driven not just by oil imports, but by dwindling domestic production, which has been falling now for seven years.

Seen in a longer time frame, Professor Mathews stated that the rise in imports and the falling exports of oil is a direct result of the ‘peaking’ of Australia’s oil supplies – an event that happened definitively in the year 2000.

Professor Mathews drew the implication from this that Australia’s oil producers, led by BHP-Billiton, Woodside, and Santos, together with foreign-owned Exxon and Chevron, are not going to solve Australia’s fossil fuel dependency crisis, and that the deficit will continue to grow until alternative fuels and sources of energy are allowed to come on stream.

Energy Bulletin, with graphs.