The Peak Oil Crisis: Parsing the Numbers

Someday peak oil will be about high gas prices and lines at the pumps, but for the time being it is mostly about numbers – lots and lots of numbers.

There are numbers for prices, numbers for oil reserves, numbers for oil demand, numbers for oil supply, numbers for oil depletion and most importantly numbers for the rates of change for all these numbers. For most people, all the thousands and thousands of numbers that pertain to the supply, demand, and costs for petroleum products are of absolutely no concern. The only thing that matters is the cost of a gallon of gas or perhaps heating oil which recently have been highly affordable.


Those who fondly believe that our economic troubles will be ending soon and that economic growth will return any day now might contemplate what the Director of The International Energy Agency said earlier this week. His message is a simple one: investment in new oil production has fallen so low that whenever an economic recovery occurs, the oil to support the recovery is unlikely to be there. Supplies will be inadequate and prices will rise much as they did last summer choking off the recovery. In the words of the headline writers “Oil crunch in 2010″.

Even more sobering are the remarks made by the CEO of France’s major oil company, Total. He too believes that the lack of investment in future oil production due to the economic slump has eliminated the chances of world oil production ever getting much beyond the levels we saw in the last two years. In a nutshell, the near-steady growth in the world’s oil production that we have witnessed for the last 150 years is over.

Falls Church News-Press