World could pass ‘peak oil’ within the next decade

The world could pass the point of peak oil - when the amount of petroleum extracted worldwide goes into terminal decline - within the next decade, an energy think tank has warned in a new report. The UK Energy Research Centre (UKERC), a government-funded body, says there is a "significant" risk that oil production will begin falling before 2020, and that it is "likely" the decline will be underway by 2030 as current oil fields are depleted and new sources become increasingly expensive to exploit.
 
Steve Sorrell, senior researcher at UKERC and the report's chief author, said: "In our view, forecasts which delay a peak in conventional oil production until after 2030 are at best optimistic and at worst implausible. Given the world's overwhelming dependence upon oil and the time required to develop alternatives, 2030 isn't far away. The concern is that rising oil prices will encourage the rapid development of carbon-intensive alternatives which will make it difficult or impossible to prevent dangerous climate change."
 
Although the report's authors acknowledge the difficulty in making assumptions about the reserves of a resource than cannot accurately be measured, they feel their conclusions are backed up by the available data.

The UKERC brought together more than 500 studies, and analysed figures from within the industry as well as from governments and organisations such as Opec to produce their report. The organisation says it's foolish to make precise forecasts about peak oil, because "data is unreliable" and there are many factors to consider. "But we can say that the window is narrowing rapidly," Sorrell cautions.
 
The onset of peak oil has been predicted before, falsely, and Sorrell and his team do note that there has always been a tendency to be pessimistic when making such predictions. Moves by oil companies to exploit such alternative sources as tar sands, and pressure to drill for oil in regions such as the Arctic and Alaska, are short-term approaches to the problem of energy depletion as they put off investment in new energy technologies, they say.

Although the scramble for energy security has begun informing the diplomatic relations with oil-producing countries like Libya - as Margareta Pagano reported in The First Post last month - the UKERC claims that governments, including the British, are not doing enough to replace the two-thirds of oil production likely to run out by 2030, and it could soon be too late ·