Carbon Shift by Thomas Homer-dixon

Author:Thomas Homer-dixon [Homer-dixon, Thomas]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Canada, Non-Fiction, Science, 21st Century, Environmentalism, Amazon.com, Retail
ISBN: 9780307357182
Publisher: Random House Canada
Published: 2009-01-01T15:00:00+00:00

Peak-Oil Debates:

Is the Peak in Conventional Oil Production Predictable?

Those who warn us of the looming crisis of peak oil seem to be generally aware of Earth’s huge fossil fuel endowment. And yet, when it comes to energy security, they seem to draw the opposite conclusion: that oil penury is already upon us and that oil prices are inevitably headed to ever higher levels. To back up this position, peak-oil champions refer to the pioneering analysis in the 1950s of the U.S. geologist M. King Hubbert. He postulated that discoveries of oil reserves in a given oil-bearing basin would trace a bell-shaped curve over time. At first discoveries would increase, and then they would hit a peak, after which they would decline as recovery efforts in the same basin faced diminishing returns. Oil production would have the same bell shape as the reserve curve, but it would lag behind it by about fifteen to twenty-five years, given the time it takes to incorporate new reserves into production. The right tail of the production curve signifies depletion of the reserves and eventually the cessation of production.

Using U.S. exploration data, Hubbert determined in 1956 that oil discoveries in the lower forty-eight U.S. states were reaching a peak and from this he predicted that peak production would occur sometime between 1965 and 1970.3 As it turned out, his prediction was quite accurate, with peak production occurring in 1970. Figure 3 depicts the bell-shaped curve, showing the addition of oil reserves over time as a result of exploration effort and the physical limits of the resource.

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