HR: 08:00h
AN: U21B-01 INVITED     [Abstracts]
TI: Hubbert's Peak: the Impending World oil Shortage
AU: * Deffeyes, K S
EM: deffeyes@mail.Princeton.EDU
AF: Department of Geosciences, Princeton University, B58A2 Guyot Hall, Princeton, NJ 08544 United States
AB: Global oil production will probably reach a peak sometime during this decade. After the peak, the world's production of crude oil will fall, never to rise again. The world will not run out of energy, but developing alternative energy sources on a large scale will take at least 10 years. The slowdown in oil production may already be beginning; the current price fluctuations for crude oil and natural gas may be the preamble to a major crisis. In 1956, the geologist M. King Hubbert predicted that U.S. oil production would peak in the early 1970s.1 Almost everyone, inside and outside the oil industry, rejected Hubbert's analysis. The controversy raged until 1970, when the U.S. production of crude oil started to fall. Hubbert was right. Around 1995, several analysts began applying Hubbert's method to world oil production, and most of them estimate that the peak year for world oil will be between 2004 and 2008. These analyses were reported in some of the most widely circulated sources: Nature, Science, and Scientific American.2 None of our political leaders seem to be paying attention. If the predictions are correct, there will be enormous effects on the world economy. Even the poorest nations need fuel to run irrigation pumps. The industrialized nations will be bidding against one another for the dwindling oil supply. The good news is that we will put less carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. The bad news is that my pickup truck has a 25-gallon tank.
DE: 6600 PUBLIC ISSUES
DE: 6620 Science policy
DE: 1699 General or miscellaneous
DE: 1610 Atmosphere (0315, 0325)
DE: 1645 Solid Earth
SC: Union [U]
MN: 2004 AGU Fall Meeting