Replies to post #8370 on PEAK OIL - EPOCHAL EVENT OF OUR LIVES

[sumisu]

I was just about to post this one. Posted segments and two charts!

"It shows that with no new investment, global oil production — including all unconventional sources — will drop by 50% by 2025 (Figure 1). That means that the global oil supply crunch is likely to happen already in the next five to six years and not in decades, as many fossil fuel companies hope. The global annual oil production is set to decline by approximately six million barrels per day starting in 2020. That means in the coming years the provision of energy related to oil will reduce annually by an amount equal to the total energy demand of Germany in 2014."


Figure 1: Oil production with no new investment from 2018 and demand in the New Policies and Sustainable Development scenarios. Source: World Energy Outlook 2018


Peak oil has been constantly underestimated by media, politics, and companies alike. Energy Watch Group was among the first to warn about it in 2008 in its study finding that the global oil supply is likely to dramatically decrease by 2020.

Instead of offering solutions in line with the Paris Climate Agreement, the IEA recommends “continued investment in oil and gas supply” in line with its policy, constantly overestimating the growth potential of fossil fuels (see the EWG analyses of the IEAs misleading scenarios on Energy Watch Group website).

New investments would be needed due to declining availability of oil at current price levels. But, the immense investments, undertaken since the early 2000s to find new oilfields, have been unsuccessful (Figure 2). On the contrary, the number of oil discoveries have fallen to a historic low.


Figure 2: Oil Finds at Lowest Since 1952. Source: Wood Mackenzie, Bloomberg.

By 2014, the oil industry started to roll back investments and rebought their own shares on a large scale. Ever since, the industry has been unwilling to scale up investments again.

The expected expansion of unconventional oil production in the USA will not be able to close the growing gap. Furthermore, within the last years, over six billion US dollars were divested from the fossil fuel energy industry. With an increasing number of investment funds, banks, countries, and companies divesting from fossil fuels, this number is expected to further grow within the next years.