Shortly after the Millennium, there was a lot of talk in environmental movements about the concept of ‘peak oil’. Oil extraction and refinement, it was claimed, could not continue to rise. The peak of a bell curve measuring amounts of oil extracted over time was about to be reached and oil extraction rates would then go into a terminal decline. At the time, there was much debate about whether we had already reached or would ever reach peak oil. The phrase is not heard so often these days: whatever happened to peak oil?

Origins of the Term ‘Peak Oil’

Naturally, the oil and gas industry and the financial institutions that are intertwined with them were way ahead of the environmental movement when it came to concerns about peak oil. They had been using the term for decades in reference to individual oil fields. For instance, the massive Alaskan oil fields reached their peak of extraction in about 1988 and have since been in decline – leaving several ghost towns in one of the world’s most beautiful wildernesses. 

Early Predictions

It doesn’t take a huge leap of imagination to think of the world as a single oilfield and try to work out when the peak of extraction will be. One of the earliest predictions was by the geologist M. King Hubbert. He theorised that all oil production – from a single pumping station to the planet as a whole – follows the same bell-shaped curved. In 1962, he predicted in his book, Energy Resources (p75) that world crude oil extraction would peak in the year 2000 at around 12.5 billion barrels a year. The International Energy Agency reports that in 2016, the world used 35 billion barrels and our thirst shows no sign of being quenched. 

Unconventional Oil

It is a mathematical truth that the rate of discovery of a finite substance will first increase sharply then dissipate as the substance is extracted. It’s like when word gets around that there’s a free bar at a wedding. However, the crude calculations were somewhat crude. They didn’t take into account unconventional sources of oil such as fracking, shale oil, oil sands and thermal depolymerisation.  

The buzz about peak oil peaked about ten years ago when the environmental movement realised that the oil running out wasn’t going to save the world. The concept ceased to be a useful one outside of its original purpose: predicting the life expectancy of extant oilfields. People would have to be weaned off their oil by being shown that greener options for energy could be cheaper than unconventional oil extraction.

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