The World in 2050_ Four Forces Shaping Civilization's Northern Future - Laurence C. Smith [29]
Most of the world’s oil still comes from giant and supergiant oil fields discovered more than fifty years ago. Many of them have now begun their decline, including Alaska’s North Slope region, Kuwait’s Burgan oil field, the North Sea, and Canterell in Mexico. Saudi Arabia is so far maintaining production from its massive Ghawar field—currently providing over 6% of the world’s oil—but eventually it, too, must decline. 107
A common debate, which to me is not a very interesting one, is whether world production of conventional oil has “peaked” already or whether that day still lies ahead—say in thirty or forty years. Beyond that time window, the chances of finding huge new discoveries of conventional oil—of sizes needed to maintain even our current rate of oil consumption, let alone meet projected growth in demand—grow dim. New oil is still being found, and exploration and extraction technologies continue to improve, but it is now quite clear that conventional oil production cannot grow fast enough to keep up with projected increases in demand over the next forty years.
The reasons for this go even beyond geological scarcity to include “above-ground” challenges in geopolitics, infrastructure, environmental protection, and an aging industry workforce. Many of the fields awaiting development are in parts of the Caucasus and Africa that are dangerously unstable.108 It takes decades and enormous investments of capital to develop an oil field, and will cost increasingly more in blood and treasure than energy investors are accustomed to. Further supply tightening derives from the fact that oil producers have a long-term financial incentive in limiting production of what is, after all, a finite resource. A large fraction of the world’s oil is now controlled by national rather than transnational oil companies. These companies, notes former U.S. secretary of energy Samuel Bodman, are beginning to wonder why they should produce now, when the same oil could make them even more money in the future. 109
The world currently consumes some 85 million barrels of oil every day and is forecast to demand 106 million barrels per day by 2030, despite the 2008-09 economic contraction and the creation of new government policies encouraging alternative energy sources.110 To meet this demand, as another former U.S. secretary of energy, James Schlesinger, recently noted, means that we must find and develop the equivalent of nine Saudi Arabias. The probability of this happening is vanishingly small.
Even if total world oil production can be increased, if production cannot keep up with demand, that is still a supply decline. Disturbing twenty-first-century scenarios of intense competition for oil—even to the point of economic collapse and violent warfare—are described in the books Out of Gas by David Goodstein, Resource Wars and Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet: The New Geopolitics of Energy by Michael Klare, and Twilight in the Desert: The Coming Saudi Oil Shock and the World Economy by Matt Simmons.111 These authors are neither hacks nor alarmists. Simmons is a lifelong Republican and oil industry insider, and is widely respected as one of the smartest data analysts in the business. Goodstein is a Caltech physicist, and Klare has long experience in military policy. “Of all the resources discussed in this book,” writes Klare in Resource Wars, “none is more likely to provoke conflict between states in the twenty-first century than oil.” There is ample empirical evidence to support this, including the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq and a 2008 war between Russia and Georgia over South Ossetia, a breakaway republic proximate to a highly strategic transport corridor for Caspian oil and gas. A struggle for control of Sudan’s south-central oil fields has contributed to ongoing unrest in a country that has seen perhaps three hundred thousand people killed and two million more displaced since 2003.
It’s true that