The future of hydrocarbons: Hubbert’s peak or a plateau?

Due to economics, science, technology, and the increased manufacturing of hydrocarbons from sources other than oil, the world’s production of oil and gas in the twenty-first century will not peak sharply but will plateau or gradually decline. The scenario presented here places us among the optimists.

Data used in this paper come mostly from the Web sites of the U.S. Energy Information Administration and the National Energy Board of Canada and from pre-1977 publications of the former U.S. Bureau of Mines.

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The concept that resources are essentially finite may have originated with Thomas Malthus. He concluded in 1798 that the exponential growth of Earth’s human population was unsustainable because agricultural production could only increase arithmetically. Since then, mechanized farming, irrigation, refrigeration, chemical fertilizers (from petroleum and other mineral deposits), hybrid grains, genetic modification, and improved transportation systems have blossomed. Now, famine is only caused by political events and by the inability to deliver emergency supplies following natural disasters.

The concept of the inelasticity of oil resources stems from Hubbert’s (1956) prediction, based on declining rates of discovery, that the annual production of oil in the 48 contiguous United States would crest in 1970, which it did, at 3.5 Gb. Hubbert’s analysis excluded Alaska and the Gulf of Mexico, where oil was discovered in the 1960s and later. Because the contiguous United States is the most explored area in the world and because the worldwide rate of discovery has declined in the past decade,