Significant Risk' Of Oil Production Peaking In Ten Years, Report Finds

Prelude from Busted - Just to help out here on what the significance is. Peak oil means that we have used half of the oil available in the earth. On the surface this does not appear to be too important until you consider our use of oil grows every year, and by a percentage, we use twice as much oil per day as we did 36 years ago and assuming steady growth, you could extend this back to the 1930s and say that we use 8 times more oil per day today than we did back then. You can see the pattern known as doubling and most people can see that if you extend this into the future, we will not have the more than 100 years it too to get to half way but SIGNIFICANTLY less, perhaps only 30-60 years after peak. Now of course as demand increases and the supply becomes both more expensive to access and drops, gas prices will go up, probably significantly if we don't have a viable alternative. Coal, most people accept as dirty no matter how you slice it. To me, the logical conclusion is that since prices are going to go up, let us more aggressively pursue clean fuel sources to be ready for the inevitable transition to a new and cleaner fuel source and while we are thinking in this vein, why not buy our scientists as much time as possible by conserving to make what we have last as long as possible.

ScienceDaily (Oct. 8, 2009) — A new report, launched by the UK Energy Research Centre (UKERC), argues that conventional oil production is likely to peak before 2030, with a significant risk of a peak before 2020. The report concludes that the UK Government is not alone in being unprepared for such an event - despite oil supplying a third of the world's energy.

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