Do you believe we have reached what is known as peak oil?

Question

This seems to be a touchy subject for many, but, in your opinion have we reached "peak oil"?

If so, what do you think will happen to the world in the next fifty years? Are you preparing for peak oil and how?

Answer 1

I have just begun to find out about the phenomenon called peak oil; and I am astonished that this is not in the public awareness and on the forefront of everybody's minds.  I guess it is because it is much easier to continue business as usual and continue to belive that nothing will ever change.  There definitely seems to be a group concensus that everything is ok we have nothing to worry about, we'll just drill more somewhere else.



However much I would really like to belive in this, all signs point otherwise.  There are a number of good documentaries, websites, and books that have begun to come out on this topic since around 2004.  Many of these sources (I will cite below) pin peak oil somewhere around 2005 and 2010, definitely by 2020.  Even the government published something in 2007 that used the conservative year of 2030, I believe, for when we might begin to run out of oil.  

I have no idea how this will play out in the next fifty years, but I strongly feel like we can face this problem and make changes now or we can ignore it and have a huge crisis when our supply cannot meet our demand.  I agree with many people on the issue of peak oil that we will necesssarily have to go from a global society to being much more intensely local.  We will have to come up with new ways to feed and shelter and transport ourselves adequately.  I think we can choose or at some point we will be forced to become small agrarian communties because our way of live as it is now is simply not sustainable.

I myself having just learned about this issue have not been preparing in anyway, other than learning more about it so far.  I, too, wonder what I and my family might need to do to prepare for this in some way.

Answer 2

We won't know if we've reached the global oil peak until many years after it's passed. But, it's likely that we are very close to that peak now. There may very well be fields yet to be discovered but all of the huge, easy oil is known. Anything left will either be too small or too difficult to extract to have much impact on global supply.

In addition to nearing the global peak, world demand is rapidly rising as well. China and India are consuming ever greater amounts of oil as they rapidly switch from 3rd to 1st world economies.

Fifty years from now? We won't run out of oil, just like we didn't run out of horses and buggys when cars became widespread. But, our main sources of energy will likely be much different and probably much more diverse.

Answer 3

Yes, I do believe we are on the plateau of production and the only way is down. At this point, the other question answerer speaks of (I think) the Bakken Oil Formation. Yes, there may well be billions of barrels down there, but it simply does not help. The "Peak Oil" problem has been put in the way that "it is not the size of the barrel, but the size of the tap" that is the issue. The sheer scale of the amount of oil required to be extracted and moved to refineries and around the world are what will defeat us. If there are a trillion barrels in The Bakken, but we can only extract 100,000 barrels a day it really is an insignificant reserve in terms of global (or even just US) requirements.

Good luck.

Answer 4

Ok, as I see it, we have NOT, repeat, NOT reached peak oil. There are still countless formations to be tapped, and who knows what reserves will be found in the future. Just look at North Dakota, USA, with the discovery of that gigantic formation that is now being tapped. So what if the UAE turns into a dry hole? It just means that we hve to explore more options and discover new formations/technologies to get at that crude.