'Peak Oil Crisis'
It is a Peak Oil news and resource site for those interested in the issue of Peak Oil. We are UK based but are interested in stories from anywhere this global problem manifests itself.



For those of you who haven't come across this phrase before, the term Peak Oil is used to describe the global maximum in conventional crude oil production which is predicted to happen in the not too distant future (if it hasn't happened already). The concept was devised by geologist Marion King Hubbert who worked for oil company Shell and who correctly predicted that in 1970 the crude oil production within the United States would peak and then decline. He then went on to say that the same thing would happen to world crude oil production eventually.



Once this maximum (or peak) has been reached global oil production will generally decline forever afterwards. It is something that will only become apparent some time after the event has happened due to fluctuations in oil production from year to year.



At the moment it appears that oil production is on a plateau with a peak occurring sometime in 2006. Production is struggling to stand still let alone increase. It is thought that global oil production from mature oil fields is declining at a rate of between 6-7% per year. This means that at current oil demand, around another 5 million barrels of new oil (crude & other liquid fuels) per day must come on line per year. This is just about happening at the moment but is getting harder everyday at oil becomes more difficult, expensive and energy intensive to extract. Also as a result of the current world economic problems and lower prices oil exploration activity has been curtailed significantly.


Peak Oil is thought to occur when roughly half of the world's oil reserves have been used up. All oil fields peak and then decline by their very nature and the concept of global Peak Oil is simply the extrapolation of this idea to the sum of all known oil fields. Peak Oil is thought to be imminent because there have been fewer 'super giant' oil field discoveries in recent years to put any potential peak in production further into the future.