The Cork Consensus

ASPO Europe peak oil conference confirms a peak in global oil production by 2012.

A conference held in Cork, Ireland by the Association for the Study of Peak oil and Gas (ASPO) last week heard representatives from industry forecast that the best data available data pointed to reserves of 250 billion barrels of yet-to-find global conventional oil, and as a result oil production would plateau at less than 100 million barrels per day before 2020. This was followed up by a range of speakers who stated that current trends in bringing new projects onstream indicate that global oil production would peak on or before 2012, a forecast that coincides with the latest announcement from International Energy Agency that an oil crunch will occur by 2012.


The case for a plateau in global oil production of less than 100M barrels/day before 2020 was put by Ray Leonard, Vice President (Eurasia) of Kuwait Energy Company, who presented a summary of the results from the Hedberg Conference. The Hedberg conference concluded that there were about 250 B barrels of conventional oil yet-to-find, 200 -1000 B barrels will be available from reserves growth, and future production from unconventional oil is unlikely to exceed 6 Mb/d. Taking all these factors into account, Leonard forecast that global oil production will plateau at less than 100 M barrels/ day before 2020. This forecast was reiterated by Mike Rodgers, Senior Partner with the highly respected US-based energy consultancy PFC Energy.

There then followed a series of speakers led by Chris Skrebowski, editor of the London-based Energy Institute