Dancing with Fairies

In recent months we at SRA have received a growing number of requests to address the question of peaking world oil production from a political point of view. To wit, is not peak oil just another wheeze to create a crisis that would facilitate the creation of global government? Isn


The best argument in favour of peak oil and gas production in principle is that there is so much empirical evidence to support the fact that it is happening. One of the most thoroughly documented cases of peaking oil production is North America, a large oil province and once the biggest producer and exporter in the world. Since peak in 1972 (the US itself peaked in 1970), North American production has fallen from a high of just over 11 million barrels a day to less than 6.5 million barrels a day in 2005. This is in spite of a big increase in offshore production and the opening of Prudhoe Bay and the Alaskan North Slope.

This experience not only demonstrates the reality of resource depletion but another important point as well. It is not just the level of output that matters but the level of demand relative to output. North American demand has soared over the last thirty five years since peak production. It takes time to bring on output from new discoveries, and big as it was, Alaska