Oil. The fast-vanishing drug the world can’t yet live without

Production may peak within a decade, causing massive withdrawal symptoms to the world and its economy

Say what you like about Dick Cheney, but you can’t accuse him of not giving us fair warning. A year, almost to the day, before he was dubiously elected Vice-President of the United States – while still chairman of the energy giant Halliburton – he gave a riveting insight into the thinking that has since guided the administration’s oil policy.

In a speech to the Institute of Petroleum in November 1999 he shed light on our front-page revelation – that in the wake of the occupation of Iraq, Western companies are to be let loose on its vast, and previously state-owned, oil reserves. Perhaps even more importantly he flagged up an impending crisis that the world urgently needs to grasp – that supplies of oil may be about to shrink alarmingly.

The “basic, fundamental building block of the world economy” was, he warned, in danger of becoming extremely scarce.

Estimates suggested that production from existing reserves would soon decline sharply, by 3 per cent a year, even as world demand for oil grew by 2 per cent. That meant that the world would soon need to be producing “an additional 50 million barrels a day”, more than half as much again as the 82 million now being wrested from the ground.

The Independent