Peak Possibilities

In July 2006, the world’s oil rigs pumped out crude at a rate of nearly 85.5 million bbl. a day. They haven’t come close since, even as prices have risen from $75 to $98 per bbl. Which raises a question of potentially epochal significance: Is it all downhill from here?

It’s not as if nobody predicted this. The true believers in what’s called peak oil–a motley crew of survivalists, despisers of capitalism, a few billionaire investors and a lot of perfectly respectable geologists–have long cited the middle to end of this decade as a likely turning point.


In the oil industry and the government agencies that work with it, such talk is usually dismissed as premature. There have been temporary drops in oil production before, after all–albeit usually during global economic slowdowns, not boom times. In most official scenarios, production will soon begin rising again, peaking at more than 110 million bbl. a day around 2030.

That’s alarming enough in itself. Even the optimists think we have less than three decades to go? But at industry conferences this fall, the word from producers was far gloomier. The chief executives of ConocoPhillips and French oil giant Total both declared that they can’t see oil production ever topping 100 million bbl. a day. The head of the oil importers’ club that is the International Energy Agency warned that “new capacity additions will not keep up with declines at current fields and the projected increase in demand.”

Time