Bottom of the barrel

The oil industry is buzzing. On Thursday, the government approved the development of the biggest deposit discovered in British territory for at least 10 years. Everywhere we are told that this is a "huge" find, which dispels the idea that North Sea oil is in terminal decline. You begin to recognise how serious the human predicament has become when you discover that this "huge" new field will supply the world with oil for five and a quarter days.

Every generation has its taboo, and ours is this: that the resource upon which our lives have been built is running out. We don't talk about it because we cannot imagine it. This is a civilisation in denial.

Oil itself won't disappear, but extracting what remains is becoming ever more difficult and expensive. The discovery of new reserves peaked in the 1960s. Every year we use four times as much oil as we find. All the big strikes appear to have been made long ago: the 400m barrels in the new North Sea field would have been considered piffling in the 1970s. Our future supplies depend on the discovery of small new deposits and the better exploitation of big old ones. No one with expertise in the field is in any doubt that the global production of oil will peak before long.
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The Age of Oil Is Over

What would you do differently if you knew you would run out of oil in your lifetime?

That's the chilling question posed by two recent books, both of which flow from the work of geophysicist Marion King Hubbert. Born in the Texas oil patch and educated at the University of Chicago, Hubbert observed that the production histories of most oilfields follow a similar pattern. Output climbs slowly after discovery, rises steeply once the reservoir is mapped, slows during the peak-production years, and then declines steeply once the easy-to-get oil is gone. When plotted on a graph, this looks like a bell curve.

Hubbert poured his own most productive years into directing research for Shell Oil, where he knew that the discovery of new U.S. oilfields had peaked in the 1930s. Hubbert factored this data into his bell-curve model, and predicted in 1956 that production of crude oil in the contiguous 48 states would peak sometime between 1966 and 1972. The oil industry dismissed his prediction and discredited his work.

U.S. crude oil production peaked in 1970, and has fallen steeply ever since.
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Ironically, neither book startles as much as one line in the preface to the revised edition of Hubbert's Peak, which states: "The year 2000 very likely will stand as the year of greatest oil production."

Production fell in '01 and '02, and looks likely to fall again in '03. In other words, the zenith of the Oil Age may have already passed.

Which brings us back to that thorny question. Here in North America – where most of us consume more than our own body weight in crude oil each week – what drastic measures would you deem reasonable if you were certain that every last drop of crude has been found, that half of it is already gone, and that at the current rate of consumption the other half won't last 50 years?
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