Exploration will not provide the oil to match demand

It is more than a year since oil prices doubled, but what are the oil companies doing? Some exploration continues but little net increase in refining capacity is planned and most of their effort seems to be going into mergers and takeovers. What do they know that they haven’t told us?

More oil fields will, of course, be found. But we will need a lot of large ones to outweigh the declining production from nearly all the existing fields – the ones that were easy to find and cheap to exploit – and to provide for the rapid growth in demand that is occurring and predicted.

Whether we can make the transition to a world much less reliant on oil and survive with some kind of civilisation depends on both time and political will.