PEAK OIL: MYTH OR REALITY?

Over the recent years, the energy sector has witnessed a tense debate amongst energy experts with one side warning of Peak Oil -mostly retired oil companies officials and geologists from the ASPO- and on the other side the “optimists” such as Exxon Mobil[1] and Saudi-Arabia[2]. Until now, the official position of the British Government on the issue can be summarized by this statement from the 10 Downing Street:

“The Government’s assessment is that the world’s oil resources are sufficient to prevent global total oil production peaking in the foreseeable future. This is consistent with the assessment made by the International Energy Agency (IEA) in its recent 2007 World Energy Outlook (WEO), which concludes that proven reserves are already larger than the cumulative production needed to meet rising demand until at least 2030.”
Nevertheless, in 2008 the IEA conducted for the first time[4] a detailed field-by-field analysis of global oil production and its findings are bleak. Asked by a journalist on what the previous analysis relied on, the Chief-Economist of the IEA acknowledged, “it was mainly an assumption”[5]. In the 2008 WEO, they have analysed about 800 fields, which account for