Steep decline in oil production brings risk of war and unrest, says
new study
World oil production has already peaked and will fall by half as soon
as 2030, according to a re****t which also warns that extreme shortages
of fossil fuels will lead to wars and social breakdown.
The German-based Energy Watch Group will release its study in London
today saying that global oil production peaked in 2006 - much earlier
than most experts had expected. The re****t, which predicts that
production will now fall by several percent a year, comes after oil
prices set new records almost every day last week, on Friday hitting
more than $90 (=A344) a barrel.
"The world soon will not be able to produce all the oil it needs as
demand is rising while supply is falling. This is a huge problem for
the world economy," said Hans-Josef Fell, EWG's founder and the German
MP behind the country's successful sup****t system for renewable
energy.
The re****t's author, Joerg Schindler, said its most alarming finding
was the steep decline in oil production after its peak, which he says
is now behind us.
The results are in contrast to projections from the International
Energy Agency, which says there is little reason to worry about oil
supplies at the moment.
However, the EWG study relies more on actual oil production data
which, it says, are more reliable than estimates of reserves still in
the ground. The group says official industry estimates put global
reserves at about 1.255 gigabarrels - equivalent to 42 years' supply
at current consumption rates. But it thinks the figure is only about
two thirds of that.
Global oil production is currently about 81m barrels a day - EWG
expects that to fall to 39m by 2030. It also predicts significant
falls in gas, coal and uranium production as those energy sources are
used up.
Britain's oil production peaked in 1999 and has already dropped by
half to about 1.6 million barrels a day.
The re****t presents a bleak view of the future unless a radically
different approach is adopted. It quotes the British energy economist
David Fleming as saying: "Anticipated supply shortages could lead
easily to disturbing scenes of mass unrest as witnessed in Burma this
month. For government, industry and the wider public, just muddling
through is not an option any more as this situation could spin out of
control and turn into a complete meltdown of society."
Mr Schindler comes to a similar conclusion. "The world is at the
beginning of a structural change of its economic system. This change
will be triggered by declining fossil fuel supplies and will influence
almost all aspects of our daily life."
Jeremy Leggett, one of Britain's leading environmentalists and the
author of Half Gone, a book about "peak oil" - defined as the moment
when maximum production is reached, said that both the UK government
and the energy industry were in "institutionalised denial" and that
action should have been taken sooner.
"When I was an adviser to government, I proposed that we set up a
taskforce to look at how fast the UK could mobilise alternative energy
technologies in extremis, come the peak," he said. "Other industry
advisers sup****ted that. But the government prefers to sleep on
without even doing a contingency study. For those of us who know that
premature peak oil is a clear and present danger, it is impossible to
understand such complacency."
Mr Fell said that the world had to move quickly towards the massive
deployment of renewable energy and to a dramatic increase in energy
efficiency, both as a way to combat climate change and to ensure that
the lights stayed on. "If we did all this we may not have an energy
crisis."
He accused the British government of hypocrisy. "Tony Blair and Gordon
Brown have talked a lot about climate change but have not brought in
proper policies to drive up the use of renewables," he said. "This is
why they are left talking about nuclear and carbon capture and
storage. "
Yesterday, a spokesman for the Department of Business and Enterprise
said: "Over the next few years global oil production and refining
capacity is expected to increase faster than demand. The world's oil
resources are sufficient to sustain economic growth for the
foreseeable future. The challenge will be to bring these resources to
market in a way that ensures sustainable, timely, reliable and
affordable supplies of energy."
The German policy, which guarantees above-market payments to producers
of renewable power, is being adopted in many countries - but not
Britain, where renewables generate about 4% of the country's
electricity and 2% of its overall energy needs.
=B7 This article was amended on Tuesday October 30 2007. We said that an
Energy Watch Group re****t found that output peaked in 2006 and would
fall 7% a year. The re****t said several per cent, not 7%. This has
been corrected.
Ashley Seager guardian.co.uk
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