Peak oil: imminent disaster or an ever-postponed horizon?

Are we running out of oil? Or will oil soon become an obsolete energy source, with production capacity permanently exceeding demand? The best experts are clear on the answer to these questions, but they do not agree with each other.

The origins of the peak

The origins of the controversy can be traced back to the mid-1950s, when the hypothesis of “peak oil” was first mooted, i.e. the idea that production would reach a plateau, followed by a decline on a slope symmetrical to that of the growth that preceded the peak. The notion of a peak was coined in 1956 by the geophysicist Marion King Hubbert. His analysis focused on the United States and he predicted that, given estimated reserves and accumulated historical production figures, production would peak in the mid-1970s and then follow a bell-shaped curve that came to be known as the ‘Hubbert curve’.

Figure 1. The original Hubbert curve

This prediction had a strong impact on the analyses carried out at the time on the relative contribution of fossil fuels and nuclear energy to the world’s long-term energy supply. In fact, from the late 1960s onwards, in the face of very buoyant oil consumption, growth in US production began to slow (see figure 3 below). And the oil shocks of 1973-1974 and 1979-1980 — following the publication of the Club of Rome report^[1] — seemed to provide resounding confirmation of a “change of world” linked to the increasing scarcity of oil.

The world was indeed changing. But the new reality happened to be complex, because at the time of the shocks, the oil industry had already set about finding new deposits, which were more difficult to access, but which were becoming economically exploitable as a result of price rises following the shocks and technological advances (3D seismic, deep and multidirectional drilling, etc.). The oil industry was indeed given a new lease of life by oil from Alaska, the North Sea, the Gulf of Mexico