Fueling Fears

Peter M. Jackson, Cambridge Energy’s director of oil industry activity, acknowledged during a teleconference with reporters yesterday that last year’s discovery of 13 billion barrels of new oil worldwide did not nearly offset the 30.7 billion barrels pumped out of the ground. That propels the belief that rapid depletion is at hand.

But that is not the case, Jackson said, because upgrades and expansions of existing fields have made them capable of producing more oil than was previously thought possible.

Cambridge Energy does not see a peak in overall production until around the middle of the century. Even then, it will be an “undulating plateau rather than a peak,” he said.

Deffeyes, however, does not buy predictions that production can keep increasing for decades, especially since in 1986 the world began burning more oil annually than it was finding.
Philadelphia Inquirer