(contd)
Not only have discoveries of supergiants dwindled to nil in the 21st century but yearly oil
finds have plummeted to between four and six billion barrels a year. There is little hope that this
trend will be reversed in the near future because most of the planet’s petroleum provinces have
now been explored for petroleum and there is only one last frontier area remaining—that of
Antarctica, with its pristine wilderness and its population of some 20 million penguins.
The decline of global oil production seems now irreversible. It is bound to occur over a
number of transitions, the first of which I have called transition 1, which has just begun in 2006.
Transition 1 has a very benign gradient of decline, and it will take months before one notices it at
all. But transition 2 will be far steeper, and each successive transition will show more
pronounced declining gradients. My WOCAP model has predicted that over the next 14 years
present global production of 81 million barrels per day will decrease by roughly 32 per cent,
down to around 55 million barrels per day by the year 2020.
Thus in the face of peak oil and its multiple consequences, which are bound to impact upon
almost all aspects of our human standards of life, it seems imperative to get prepared to face all
the inevitable shockwaves resulting from that. Preparation should be carried out on individual,
familial, societal and national levels as soon as possible. Every preparative step taken today will
prove far cheaper than any step taken tomorrow. I thank you for your attention during my
opening statement, and I am ready now to try, to the best of my abilities, to reply to any
questions that you have.
