The Death of Conventional Oil

Remember the good old days when oil was $50 a barrel? I know that was only a few months ago–but just wait a few years from now when you’re wishing the price for a barrel of sweet crude was below $100. The reality is that peak oil is a lot closer than you think.

Twelve million barrels a day is a lot. That’s how much more oil we’ll need just to satisfy our addiction in eight years. The EIA estimates global demand for oil will reach 98 million barrels per day by 2015 (the demand is almost 86 MMbbls/day right now).


Allow me to put that into perspective for a second. The world’s largest oil field–the mammoth Ghawar field in Saudi Arabia–churns out roughly five million barrels of oil every day, meeting nearly 6% of the world’s demand.

That means we need to find more than two Ghawar fields in just a few years!

But that’s not even the bad news . . .

Energy and Capital