Peak Oil and Hubbert’s Peak

Much of the peak-oil arguments center around the work of M. King Hubbert, who was a big-shot geologist for Shell Oil. Hubbert developed a set of formulas predicting a bell-shaped curve for oil production over time: slow in the beginning, speeding up, levelling off and peaking, and then falling at the same rate that it rose. Hubbert used these formulas in the 1950’s to estimate when American oil would peak, and successfully predicted a peak in the early 1970’s.

The concept of “peak oil” means different things to different people. Some people use it as a general term to describe the eventual slowdown and then dwindling of oil production. I get the feeling that most people use it in Hubbert’s sense: that production over time rises, reaches some high point, maybe plateaus there for a while, and then inexorably declines. A lot of people take that behavior as a given, where the only unknowns are when the peak occurs, how high it is, and how fast or slow the rate of decline is.

I think it’s important to realize that there are a number of implicit assumptions being made in that case. These assumptions include: the amount of demand, rate of discovery, and efficiency of extraction. For example, take the graph of US production. There are two peaks here; the second one occurring when the Alaskan oilfields hit their stride. You could argue that the curve has an overall bell-shape, but note that the “plateau” was relatively long-lasting – about fifteen years between the first peak (1970) and the second (1985).


Source: http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/aer/txt/ptb0502.html.

One thing you can assert with confidence: if you assume that the amount of oil in the ground is fixed, then eventually production will near zero. But when will that happen?