IEA: oil depletion rate a stunning 9.1%
October 30th, 2008Earlier this year, The IEA promised to actually do a thorough bottom-up evaluation of the world’s oil supply rather than continue to base its future projections of oil production on anticipated demand.
The London Financial Times has published excerpts from a leaked draft of the report. According to the Times, the report will say the natural annual rate of output decline will be 9.1 percent.
Even huge investments in additional supply will only result in reducing the annual rate of output decline will be 6.4 percent. Depletion will become even more acute as prices fall and investment decisions are delayed.
As Richard Heinberg says, peak oil is history. If nine percent is even close to being a real figure, then it’s absolutely clear that July 2008 will prove to have been the all-time peak in world oil production.
A new report from a UK business-sponsored peak oil group says that the risk from falling oil production in coming years is greater than the threat posed by terrorism or the short-term impacts of climate change. The task force found Chris Skrebowski’s scenario “highly probable.” Skrebowski, consulting editor of Petroleum Review, projects that global oil production will peak in the period 2011-2013 and then decline steadily, with non-conventional sources such as tar sands failing to fill the gap in time to avoid a serious energy crunch. He also warns that supplies could collapse if a handful of huge, long-established oil fields go into terminal decline simultaneously.