Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
ty-first century progresses. Burning up the maximum estimated amount
of conventional oil - 3.5 trillion barrels - might well make the planet
uninhabitable for humans.
Plateau oil
Attempting precise predictions about future oil production is a mug's
game (see box on M. King Hubbert and Peak Oil). So most future-
watchers these days hedge their bets by forecasting that the long rise in
oil output will start to level out in a few years' time, or resolve in a couple
of decades into a plateau - a sort of multi-year horizon of peaks - before
beginning its decline.
How high will the plateau be? That depends on how supply and demand
factors play out. The increase in oil demand these days comes from the
transport sector worldwide and from developing countries. If richer
countries - in the name of sustainability - can start running their cars on
biofuel or electricity, and if poorer countries can cut oil out of their power
generation sectors altogether, then global oil demand would slacken. But
the effect and timing of demand-reduction policies is hard to gauge. On
the supply-side argument, one leading oil industry figure, Christophe de
Margerie, the head of French
oil major Total, has stuck
his neck out to forecast that
world oil production, cur-
rently around 85m b/d, will
never go above 100m b/d.
His main reason for saying
this is that too much of the
world's oil is closed off to
international oil companies
like his, and instead is in the
hands of national oil com-
panies with no commercial
or political cause to maxi-
mize production. He has also
been forthright in stating sim-
ply that the oil industry has
been over-optimistic about
the geology, “not in terms of
reserves, but in terms of how
Christophe de Margerie, CEO of Total Oil,
forecasts that, due to the declining quality
of oilfields currently being exploited and the
big question mark hanging over oil's “known
unknowns” - Iraq, Venezuela and Nigeria -
oil production will not increase to anything
like the level that the IEA predicts.
