The End of the Oil Age is Coming

Chuck Taylor has held senior management positions with Nabisco Brands, Ryder System Inc., Burlington Northern/Santa Fe Railroad, Mercer Management Consultants, Tri Valley Growers, American National Can, ServiceCraft Logistics, and Norbridge Inc., and recently founded an organization called Awake! He founded Awake! out of concern the supply chain profession is not informed about the critical changes facing it with the end of cheap oil. One goal is to raise awareness so supply chain professionals will understand the stakes and take an active role in shaping energy policy.

…In 2004, a time when oil prices rose to exorbitant levels, Chuck Taylor attended the CSCMP conference. “There were 280 breakout sessions,” Chuck said, “and there wasn’t one discussion about energy and its impact on transportation.” From that point forward, Chuck Taylor’s career revolved around his knowledge of oil’s impact on supply chain. Having recently sold a third-party logistics company in California, Chuck moved back to Texas, and with a little extra time on his hands, he decided to get serious about communicating the gravity of the oil situation to the supply chain industry. He wanted to let people know that aren’t going to be any big oil discoveries coming online like there were in the 70s and 80s. “It’s going to be a struggle for the oil industry to meet world demand going forward,” he said, ” and at some point, probably in the near future, we are going reach a point where world oil production is going to peak and start down the back-slide.”

Supply Chain Examiner