The end of the Oil Age is in sight, but who is looking?

Early this spring, in an oleaginously expensive West End restaurant, a Texan oilman who is close to George Bush set out to sell me a line. The company and the setting were unfamiliar enough – the pitch, from such a source, even more so. The Oil Age, that has so dominated our lives, shaped our world – and still underpins our prosperity – is about to come to an end, he said. Not, as doom-mongering environmentalists have falsely predicted, because the black gold is about to run out. But, much more subtly, because world production will start falling in the next few years, demand will outrun supply and prices will shoot up.