[Peakoil] Peak Oil: Ugo Bardi: Peak oil: has it arrived?

[Antony Barry]

Last week, at a public meeting, I was asked several times if this famed "peak oil" has arrived or not. People who have heard of peak oil seem to be becoming impatient, but I am afraid we'll have to wait a little longer. Peak oil is not here yet, at least if we intend it as a significant decline in the production of combustible liquids. Does that mean that the predictions based on the Hubbert model were wrong? In a sense, yes: you should know that all models are wrong by definition. Some, however, can be useful if you know how to use them. That's the case of the Hubbert model: it had given us a useful warning that, however, we chose to ignore. Let me explain this point by means of a summary
of a talk that I gave at the conference on the future of energy organized in Basel by the Club of Rome on 16-17 october 2011. A few months have passed since I gave that talk, but things haven't changed much from then.

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. My time today is short, so I'll try to go as fast as possible, limiting myself to a brief discussion on the models that lead to the concept called "peak oil." From that you can make up your mind yourselves on what's happening today to the oil market and how the economy could be affected.

So, first of all, what is "peak oil"? The term was introduced by Colin Campbell in 2002 to indicate the "tipping point" in the world oil production, that is the point when the historical production maximum is reached and an irreversible decline starts. But the idea of a "production peak" for oil is much older. It goes back to a paper that Marion King Hubbert presented in 1956, where he proposed that the production of crude oil in the United States (more exactly in the 48 lower states) would follow a "bell shaped" curve. Here is the curve that Hubbert proposed

You see that the curve is supposed to have a peak midway, and that is the element that has gained most of the attention today. The date of the peak, in particular, has taken a certain value of prophecy. And there is no doubt that Hubbert got something right. Here is a comparison with the historical data.

Now, as you can see, the agreement with the historical data of one of the curves proposed by Hubbert is very good. Actually, it is excellent considering the time span involved. It is not so easy to make a prediction that turns out to be so good 14 years afterward! And the prediction continued to be good for many years, until recently, when production showed an increase that moved it away from the Hubbert curve. But, again, that doesn't detract from the fact that Hubbert had clearly predicted that production would run into troubles at a certain point. It did...


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