Peak Oil

You’re hitting the gym. You’re tall, dark (well, maybe pasty), and handsome. You’re at your peak...or are you? Maybe you’ll continue gyming it up, and age like fine wine.

Oil has its peak too, and it’s just as hard to tell if it’s hit its peak or not.

Peak oil is the theoretical point in time when we’ve hit the maximum rate of oil extraction. In the storybook of Mankind & Dinobones, the story goes that we discovered oil and how to use it as fuel. We pump more and more dino bones out of the Earth, until...we hit that peak. From there on, we’re pumping less and less oil out of the ground. There was only ever so much oil down there. It doesn’t grow on trees or on stock markets.

Peak oil is a tricky thing to nail down since we’re still finding out where oil is and where it isn’t. If we knew exactly how much oil there was, it’d be easy to figure out when we’re going to hit peak oil, and when we’ll run out. Things like changing technology (looking at you, fracking) also change the potential timing of peak oil.

Stable oil companies stake a claim on areas that have oil. They try to keep the amount they’re extracting and selling at (at least) the same amount that they have in oil reserves...oil that’s claimed but yet to be extracted. As oil reserves start getting harder to keep pace with oil sales, we’ll know we’re surpassed peak oil. At that point, everyone will have to start switching over to other types of energy.

Initially, some estimates were that peak oil would be in the 1970s. Fracking created a rebound after a decline in oil production in the 2000s. Some people think we’ve passed peak oil recently, while others think we will before 2030. Where will you be when peak oil hits?