Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
increase were to continue for the rest of the century we
would be using more than
million barrels per day by
the year
and would be in trouble with supply, as
I show below.
Some have said that there will be a peak in oil produc-
tion in the next few decades followed by a slow decline,
but this is only partly true. There will be a peak in the next
few decades in oil with low extraction costs, but not in oil
as a whole. The notion of a peak followed by an inexor-
able decline is based on a simple idea. The resource has a
certain size; demand keeps rising; as more and more of
the resource is used up it becomes harder to keep up
production, and production has to begin to fall. In the
oil business
is peak after
Dr. M. K. Hubbert. He was a geologist specializing in
oil and predicted in
this
is known as Hubbert
'
that US domestic oil production
would reach a peak in the early
s and fall thereafter.
His prediction was based on the speed with which
demand for oil was increasing and the (decreasing) rate
at which new reserves were being discovered.
Domestic production in the United States did peak in
, and ever since then the peak notion has attracted
much attention and resulted in many wrong predictions.
The problem is that the resource has to be known for the
time of peak production to be determined, and the
resource keeps on expanding as new kinds of oil are added
to the world reserves that were not previously considered
to be usable. What Hubbert really said was that there
would be a peak in the production of the light, easily
extracted oil we were producing then, and there he was
correct. In the oil industry, technology has been
developed that makes production possible from resources
