These are warnings it would be wise to heed.

Many think that scientists are alway crying wolf and forcasting doom and gloom, later to be proved wrong. However a cursory look at this table of a list of forcasts of Peak Oil from the 1970's onwards tells a different story!

Table of Forecasts of World Oil Supply

* Gb = billion barrels.

Notes to Table

[1]. The Ecologist. ‘ A Blueprint for Survival ', Penguin, London, 1972; see pp 18 and 130. This report looked at the impact of continued exponential demand growth on oil's lifetime, but also presented the ESSO forecast given here. (As mentioned above, the calculations of the 1970's did not foresee the global demand reduction from the oil shocks, so assumed production would rise to peak at about 100 million barrels per day. This put the conventional oil peak earlier than if based on actual demand.)

[2]. B. Ward & R. Dubos, ‘ Only One Earth: the Care and Maintenance of a Small Planet , Penguin Books, UK, 1972, p 184. This was a landmark report. Its status was ‘an unofficial report commissioned by the Secretary-General of the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment', Stockholm, 1972. A committee of 158 extraordinarily eminent ‘scientific and intellectual leaders from fifty-eight countries served as consultants' in the report's preparation. The full extract (p184) is: “One of the most quoted estimates for usable reserves [of oil] is some 2,500 billion barrels. This sounds very large, but the increase in demand foreseen over the next three decades makes it likely that peak production will have been reached by the year 2000. Thereafter it will decline.”

[3]. H.S.D. Cole et al., Eds. Thinking about the Future: A critique of 'The Limits to Growth' , Science Policy Research Unit, Sussex University, Chatto & Windus, 1974. This quotes a variety of estimates of ultimately recoverable oil reserves made mostly in the 1960's, including those of Hubbert in 1969 and Warman in 1971.

[4]. W. Marshall. Energy research and development in the United Kingdom , Energy paper No. 11, UK Department of Energy, 1976; p 12.

[5]. M.K. Hubbert. Project Interdependence: U.S. and World Energy Outlook Through 1990 . Congressional Research Service, Washington, 1977, p 624; quoted in: ‘ The Global 2000 Report to the President' , Penguin', 1982, p 353. Hubbert took Nehring's world ultimate oil reserves estimate of 2,000 billion barrels, and assumed that oil production would be limited only by resource availability. On this basis, he calculated that world production would reach a peak at about 100 Mb/d, around the year 1996.

[6]. P.R. Ehrlich, A.H. Ehrlich and J.P. Holden. EcoScience: Population, Resources, Environment. W.H. Freeman, San Francisco, 1977, ISBN 0-7167-0567-2, pp 400-404. A widely-quoted textbook. 2 The authors calculated a ‘Hubbert' peak based on the ‘high-estimate' for global conventional oil endowment of 10,900 trillion MJ (~ 1900 Gb). (Interestingly, the book also draws attention to the then-controversy which led to the USGS revising down, by a factor of 3, its estimates for US undiscovered recoverable oil and gas.) [As a side comment, it is probable that the famous Simon vs. Ehrlich, Harte and Holdren ‘commodity price bet' failed in large measure because of the more than two-fold fall in real-terms oil price (reflected also in other energy prices) between 1980 and 1990; energy being a large component of mineral extraction costs. Since the high price of 1980 was driven, fundamentally, by the US oil peak nearly a decade earlier, the conclusions generally drawn by economists from the outcome of that bet probably need revision.]

[7]. A.F. Beijdorff. ‘Energy Efficiency', Group Planning, Shell International Petroleum Company, London, April 1979; p 1. (Current modeling suggests the world peak may be fairly sharp, rather than the long plateau suggested in this Shell study.)

[8]. BP report Oil crisis ... again ? , published in 1979. In terms of UK views, this report is one of the more significant of the examples of 'failed' forecasts that people (e.g., J. Mitchell, P.R. Odell) choose to quote. It indicated that non-communist world oil production would peak in 1985. This forecast bears examination. The first step is to add back in communist production. Then, like other forecasts of that time, the report assumed rising production when high prices were in fact reducing demand. Adjusting for this, and for the subsequent increases in production of NGLs and non-conventional oil, makes the resulting prediction look reasonable; forecasting a fall in global conventional oil production from around the year 2000.

[9]. The World Bank. Global Energy Prospects , World Bank Staff Working Paper No. 489, 1981. See pp 37, 46. The report said: "The bulk of the world's reserves, principally in the Middle East, was built up in most part during the 1960s. Despite increased incentives to explore for oil provided by higher prices, conventional oil production is projected to reach a plateau around the turn of the century.” (Note that by the early 1980's, the impact of the demand reduction was becoming visible, and hence the calculated global peak date, for a given assumed ‘ultimate', falls later.) Elsewhere, p 46, this quotes ultimate recoverable oil reserves as being 1,900 billion barrels, and says: "According to some estimates, the world's ultimate recoverable gas reserves are at least equal to [those of oil]".

[10]. C.J. Campbell and J.H. Laherrère. ‘ The World's Supply of Oil, 1930 – 2050 '. Report from Petroconsultants S.A., Geneva, 1995. (See also: C.J. Campbell & J.H. Laherrère, The End of Cheap Oil , Scientific American , March 1998, pp59-65.) This is one of the more detailed studies to date, and is the basis for the information provided in this website. As explained in earlier sections of this website, this study used full access to the standard industry oil resource database to carry out analyses of hydrocarbon reserves, with those in particular countries requiring adjustment. It also used a range of statistical approaches to assess the yet-to-find, and the logistic model to generate future hydrocarbon production. As critics have pointed out, this study did not explicitly include the effects of technology or price on the assessments of regional and global ‘ultimates'. But the authors maintain, with considerable supporting evidence, that price and technology have only a limited effect on the size of these ‘ultimates', at least as they affect calculations of production peak date.

[11]. L.F. Ivanhoe. Updated Hubbert Curves Analyze World Oil Supply . World Oil , Vol. 217, No. 11, November, 1996, pp 91-94. Used USGS discovery data, and the fact that production has to largely mirror discovery. A clear warning of the problems to come.

[12]. J.D. Edwards. Crude oil and alternative energy production forecasts of the Twenty-First Century: The end of the Hydrocarbon Era . AAPG Bulletin , vol. 81 pp1292-1305, 1997. A reasonable study, but limited by lack of access to industry data, so arrives at a high global ultimate.

[13]. The International Energy Agency ‘ World Energy Outlook '; published Nov. 1998; ISBN 92-64-16185-6. Used the 1994 USGS mean estimate for global conventional ‘ultimate', of 2300 Gb, for its reference case. It also used a low case of 2000 Gb, (based on the Petroconsultants report) and a high case of 3000 Gb (based perhaps on Odell's data). The rate of discovery that would support the high case ‘ultimate' was not examined. The study did not specifically account for the impact of likely price and technology developments, though it did examine the scope for non-conventional oils to come on-stream.

[14]. L. Magoon. USGS Open File Report, 00-320 Version 1. The main USGS 2000 survey (Ahlbrandt et al .) examined total oil available (basin ‘oiliness'), but did not look in detail at the rate at which these resources can be discovered. Magoon of the USGS endorsed data in the Scientific American article by Campbell & Laherrère on the rate at which the resources can become available.

[15]. C.J. Cambpbell. Oil Reserves and Depletion . PESGB Newsletter , Petroleum Exploration Society of Great Britain, March 1999, pp 87-90. A partial update of the 1995 Petroconsultants report. It analysed polar & deepwater oil separately, but added these back in the full analysis.

[16]. A.A. Bartlett. An analysis of US and world oil production patterns using Hubbert-style curves. Mathematical Geology , 32/1, pp1-17, 2000. Bartlett does not have access to the industry data, so predicted peak based on these two assumed values for the conventional ‘ultimate'.

[17]. The International Energy Agency. ‘ World Energy Outlook ', 2000. Used the USGS 2000 survey mean oil-plus-NGLs ‘ultimate', including reserves growth, of 3345 Gb. The IEA state that such data are “authoritative”, but, as mentioned above, the data pay no attention to the rate that such oil can be discovered. Note that USGS 2000 data include a large allocation for reserves growth, contrary to the decision of the previous survey. The USGS team has subsequently re-evaluated its approach of basing global reserves growth on the US' experience.

[18]. US Energy Information Administration website, 2001. Uses the USGS 2000 mean ‘ultimate' of for conventional oil (excluding NGLs, but including reserves growth), of 3003 Gb. If the world decline rate is taken as 2% p.a., this puts peak at 2016. If a much steeper (probably unrealistic) decline rate of 10% p.a. is assumed, this puts the peak later, at 2037.As with the IEA 1998 World Energy Outlook above, this study uses USGS 2000 survey results in an uncritical manner, both on the rate of discovery of oil, and on the scope for reserves growth outside the U.S.

[19]. K.S. Deffeyes. ‘ Hubbert's Peak ', Princeton University Press, 2001; ISBN 0-691-09086-6. Uses a range of statistical techniques, based, essentially, on the discovery trend curve indicating the likely ‘ultimate'. This study has no direct access, we believe, to the industry database.

[20]. M.R. Smith. Analysis of Global Oil Supply to 2050. Consultancy report from The Energy Network , March 2002. Production estimates are based on detailed country by country exploration analyses, and use individual depletion curves to meet calculated ‘ultimates', rather than simple ‘mid-point peaking'. Includes data on the non-conventionals, and expected oil price forecasts. Global ultimate is 2180 Gb, making the global peak in 2011 if global demand is assumed to rise by 2%/yr.; or 2016 at 1%/yr. growth.

[21]. ‘Nemesis', in a contribution in ASPO/ODAC Newsletter , Issue 15, March 2002. This study generates a range for the dates of peak production, based on cumulati ve production to-date; plus reserves and ‘net discovery' data from Campbell and BP's Schollnberger. This approach avoids the need to use specific estimates of ‘ultimate', but yields the approximate ‘equivalent ultimates' listed in the Table.