Great Britain as an example of the Export Land Model
February 25th, 2010A post by Zoe MacIntosh at Heatingoil.com contains a couple of graphs that beautifully illustrate Jeffry Brown’s Export Land Model – which posits that it’s global oil exports that really matter, not global oil production.
First, here’s Brown’s classic graph.
As domestic consumption continues to rise after oil production peaks, exports quickly decline to zero.
Now take a look at a real-world example: Great Britain.
Wikipedia has graphs of other examples of countries where oil exports are seeing accelerated declines due to rising domestic consumption: Indonesia, Egypt, Malaysia, Mexico. The implications for oil importing nations are ominous as ever more oil exporting nations hit peak and begin to decline.
The Wikipedia article argues that Great Britain doesn’t fit the model because domestic consumption has remained essentially unchanged for the last 20 years rather than rising. Changing the slope of the domestic consumption line in the Export Land Model graph from rising to flat does, of course, make a difference for exports. But ultimately the results are similarly stark for exports – level domestic consumption, or even domestic consumption that declines less rapidly than domestic production, means that soon there’s no excess oil left to export. The only difference is how “soon” soon is. Despite flat domestic consumption, Great Britain has now shifted from an oil exporter to an oil importer, sucking supplies from the rest of the world rather than adding to world supplies.