EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Global oil peaking: Responding to the case for ‘abundant supplies of oil’

Q.Y. Meng and R.W. Bentley

Energy, 2008, vol. 33, issue 8, 1179-1184

Abstract: This paper examines aspects of the case against global oil peaking, and in particular sets out to answer a viewpoint that the world can have abundant supplies of oil “for years to come”. Arguments supporting the latter view include: past forecasts of oil shortage have proved incorrect, so current predictions should also be discounted; many modellers depend on Hubbert's analysis but this contained fundamental flaws; new oil supply will result from reserves growth and from the wider deployment of advanced extraction technology; and that the world contains large resources of unconventional oil that can come on-stream if the production of conventional oil declines. These arguments are examined in turn and shown to be incorrect, or to need setting into a broader context. The paper concludes therefore that such arguments cannot be used to rule out calculations that the resource-limited peak in the world's production of conventional oil will occur in the near term. Moreover, peaking of conventional oil is likely to impact the world's total availability of oil where the latter includes non-conventional oil and oil substitutes.

Keywords: Oil supplies; Forecasts; Resource depletion; Oil peaking (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2008
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (23)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0360544208000935
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:energy:v:33:y:2008:i:8:p:1179-1184

DOI: 10.1016/j.energy.2008.04.001

Access Statistics for this article

Energy is currently edited by Henrik Lund and Mark J. Kaiser

More articles in Energy from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-19
Handle: RePEc:eee:energy:v:33:y:2008:i:8:p:1179-1184