The looming oil crisis could arrive uncomfortably soon

The world’s production of oil will peak, everyone agrees. Sometime in the coming decades, the amazing machinery of oil production that doubled world oil output every decade for a century will sputter. Output will stop rising, even as demand continues to grow. The question is when.

Forecasts of peak oil production have ranged from Thanksgiving weekend 2005 to somewhere beyond 2050. But at the annual meeting of the American Association of Petroleum Geologists (AAPG) in Long Beach, California, early this month, the latest answer emerged: World oil production could stop growing as early as 2020–too soon to avoid a crisis–or it could hold off until 2040. “The peak in world oil production is not imminent,” oil information analyst Richard Nehring of Nehring Associates in Colorado Springs, Colorado, said at the meeting, but it is “nevertheless foreseeable.”


Predictions of the timing of peak oil have been all over the map (Science, 18 November 2005, p. 1106). So-called peakists favor gauging future production by judging how much oil Earth still holds and how much has already been produced. They come up with a peak in the next few years, certainly before 2020. At the other extreme, major oil companies draw on in-house expertise about how much oil remains and how fast it will be produced. They see no end to rising production as far out as they look, usually not beyond 2030.

Nehring took a different tack, in two ways. First, he conducted an informal survey of experts by organizing a meeting, a prestigious Hedberg Conference, under the auspices of AAPG last November and inviting 75 experts from 19 countries to consider the world’s oil resources. There he pressed them for their best estimates of everything from how much oil might be left to discover to how much might be wrung from existing oil fields and how much might come from unconventional sources such as Canadian tar sands.

Science, via Energy Bulletin