Oil peak: A crude ruse?

“We’re running out of oil!” We’ve been hearing this warning at least since the 1970s oil shocks, but recently it has been proclaimed with increasing insistence.

The idea goes back to 1956, when Shell geologist M King Hubbert declared that the world had enough oil for only about 50 more years. This thesis, popularly known as “peak oil” or “Hubbert’s peak”, was based on his estimates of petroleum reserves and ever-increasing energy demand.


Were Hubbert right, the productivity of oil wells should be plummeting about now. In fact, my next trip in my Toyota could be my last car ride ever.

So are we running short of oil? Far from it. By 2007, exploitable reserves of oil were well over one trillion barrels. Current world demand, according to the United States-based Energy Information Administration, is 31,4-billion barrels a year.

Since Hubbert’s day, technologies for oil exploration have improved at breakneck speed, leading to the discovery of deposits in places nobody imagined decades ago. And new extraction technologies now make it possible to obtain oil from increasingly remote places and geological formations that were previously impenetrable.

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