[Peakoil-announce] Steep decline in oil production brings risk of war and unrest, says

[Alex Pollard]

Not a great deal of new info in this, but gaining increasing attention.

The situation is dire, and that's without an oil export crisis, wherein the 
oil exporters export less and less and use more internally.

Alex
O4O4873828

ACT Peak Oil
http://act-peakoil.org

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Steep decline in oil production brings risk of war and unrest, says
new study

*· * Output peaked in 2006 and will fall 7% a year
*· * Decline in gas, coal and uranium also predicted

*Ashley Seager
Monday October 22, 2007
The Guardian <http://www.guardian.co.uk>*

World oil production has already peaked and will fall by half as soon as 
2030, according to a report which also warns that extreme shortages of 
fossil fuels will lead to wars and social breakdown.

The German-based Energy Watch Group will release its study in London 
today saying that global oil production peaked in 2006 - much earlier 
than most experts had expected. The report, which predicts that 
production will now fall by 7% a year, comes after oil prices set new 
records almost every day last week, on Friday hitting more than $90 
(£44) a barrel.

"The world soon will not be able to produce all the oil it needs as 
demand is rising while supply is falling. This is a huge problem for the 
world economy," said Hans-Josef Fell, EWG's founder and the German MP 
behind the country's successful support system for renewable energy.

The report's author, Joerg Schindler, said its most alarming finding was 
the steep decline in oil production after its peak, which he says is now 
behind us.

The results are in contrast to projections from the International Energy 
Agency, which says there is little reason to worry about oil supplies at 
the moment.

However, the EWG study relies more on actual oil production data which, 
it says, are more reliable than estimates of reserves still in the 
ground. The group says official industry estimates put global reserves 
at about 1.255 gigabarrels - equivalent to 42 years' supply at current 
consumption rates. But it thinks the figure is only about two thirds of 
that.

Global oil production is currently about 81m barrels a day - EWG expects 
that to fall to 39m by 2030. It also predicts significant falls in gas, 
coal and uranium production as those energy sources are used up.

Britain's oil production peaked in 1999 and has already dropped by half 
to about 1.6 million barrels a day.

The report presents a bleak view of the future unless a radically 
different approach is adopted. It quotes the British energy economist 
David Fleming as saying: "Anticipated supply shortages could lead easily 
to disturbing scenes of mass unrest as witnessed in Burma this month. 
For government, industry and the wider public, just muddling through is 
not an option any more as this situation could spin out of control and 
turn into a complete meltdown of society."

Mr Schindler comes to a similar conclusion. "The world is at the 
beginning of a structural change of its economic system. This change 
will be triggered by declining fossil fuel supplies and will influence 
almost all aspects of our daily life."

Jeremy Leggett, one of Britain's leading environmentalists and the 
author of Half Gone, a book about "peak oil" - defined as the moment 
when maximum production is reached, said that both the UK government and 
the energy industry were in "institutionalised denial" and that action 
should have been taken sooner.

"When I was an adviser to government, I proposed that we set up a 
taskforce to look at how fast the UK could mobilise alternative energy 
technologies in extremis, come the peak," he said. "Other industry 
advisers supported that. But the government prefers to sleep on without 
even doing a contingency study. For those of us who know that premature 
peak oil is a clear and present danger, it is impossible to understand 
such complacency."

Mr Fell said that the world had to move quickly towards the massive 
deployment of renewable energy and to a dramatic increase in energy 
efficiency, both as a way to combat climate change and to ensure that 
the lights stayed on. "If we did all this we may not have an energy crisis."

He accused the British government of hypocrisy. "Tony Blair and Gordon 
Brown have talked a lot about climate change but have not brought in 
proper policies to drive up the use of renewables," he said. "This is 
why they are left talking about nuclear and carbon capture and storage. "

Yesterday, a spokesman for the Department of Business and Enterprise 
said: "Over the next few years global oil production and refining 
capacity is expected to increase faster than demand. The world's oil 
resources are sufficient to sustain economic growth for the foreseeable 
future. The challenge will be to bring these resources to market in a 
way that ensures sustainable, timely, reliable and affordable supplies 
of energy."

The German policy, which guarantees above-market payments to producers 
of renewable power, is being adopted in many countries - but not 
Britain, where renewables generate about 4% of the country's electricity 
and 2% of its overall energy needs.

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian News and Media Limited 2007