Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
sites, including
TheOilDrum.com
and
EnergyBulletin.net
, reported brisk traffic; the list of peak oil
topics and peer-reviewed papers was lengthening; and a growing roster of public speakers was lec-
turing on the dim prospects of the oil industry and the dimmer prospects of the world's oil-depend-
ent economies.
My personal career morphed in tandem: I moved from teaching to a full-time position with
Post Carbon Institute. When I wasn't on the road speaking, I was writing more topics—
Powerdown
(2004),
The Oil Depletion Protocol
(2006),
Peak Everything
(2007),
Blackout
(2009),
The End of
Growth
(2011), and
Snake Oil
(2013)—as well as blogs, articles, essays, reports, and forewords to,
or endorsements of, other authors' topics.
Post Carbon Institute meanwhile recruited 28 fellows; compiled a
Post Carbon Reader
that is
now on college curricula around the nation; published other topics (including
Energy: Overdevelop-
ment and the Delusion of Endless Growth
and the
Community Resilience Guides
series); produced
ing David Hughes's influential critique of US shale resources, “Drill, Baby, Drill.”
6
A thrilling decade it was. And here we are now. . .with press articles appearing almost daily
featuring some variation of the title, “Peak Oil Is Dead.” What the hell happened?
Reassessment: Was (or Is) the Party Really Over?
The central claim of many recent “Peak Oil Is Dead” articles is that peak oil theorists were simply
wrong.
7
Were we? Well, let's use
The Party's Over
as a representative example of peak oil literature
and see. I reread the topic (for the first time in several years) as preparation for writing this essay,
and the following are a few critical notes.
Chapters 1
and
2
,
which tell the tale of energy's role in ecology, history, and the economy, are
the topic's foundation. Leaving aside the question of how skillfully it's presented, it still impresses
me as a story that deserves to be known and understood by everybody. There's very little that needs
revision here.
Chapter 3
, which explains peak oil, is pivotal to the topic's overall argument. By current stand-
ards, much of this material is simplistic and dated. I fixed some problems in the revised 2005 edi-
tion, but that version itself is now stale.
The Party's Over
doesn't offer an original analysis of oil
reserves or production data; instead it surveys the forecasts of “peakists” who were active at the
time, many of whom are now less active or deceased.
The most obvious criticism that could be leveled at the topic today is the simple observation
that, as of 2014, world oil production is increasing, not declining. However, the following passage
from
page 118
of the 2003 edition points to just how accurate the leading peakists were in fore-
casting trends: “Colin Campbell estimates that extraction of conventional oil will peak before 2010;
however, because more unconventional oil—including oil sands, heavy oil, and oil shale—will be
produced during the coming decade, the total production of fossil-fuel liquids (conventional plus
unconventional) will peak several years later. According to Jean Laherrère, that may happen as late
as 2015.” On
page 121
of the topic I explicitly endorsed the forecast of a peak sometime in the peri-
od between 2006 and 2015.
From today's perspective that's still an entirely defensible assessment of global oil supply pro-
spects. Worldwide production of regular, conventional oil (excluding deepwater oil, tar sands, tight
oil, biofuels, and natural gas liquids such as propane) did indeed begin a gentle, continuing decline
around 2006, and a peak for all petroleum liquids by 2015 is still likely though by no means cer-
