The Peak Oil Crisis: The 4 Facets of Peak Oil (Tom Whipple)

  Looming just over the horizon are four great storms that soon will have a major impact on nearly all the world’s peoples and their descendents for decades to come. We know these storms are coming, for we can clearly see their outlines and some are already beginning to feel the winds.

  Tom Whipple -- Falls Church News-Press

  Mar. 1, 2007 -- Looming just over the horizon are four great storms that soon will have a major impact on nearly all the world’s peoples and their descendents for decades to come. We know these storms are coming, for we can clearly see their outlines and some are already beginning to feel the winds.

  We don’t know the exact timing nor the order of these storms’ arrival. We do know that the order in which they come will be important to how these storms interact with what our lifestyles will be like in the years ahead.

  The first storm is what we talk about in this column: the balance between oil depletion and production from new oilfields that will determine how much longer the world’s economy can continue in its present form. For the last 140 years, the world has had nearly uninterrupted access to a virtually unlimited supply of oil. Except in times of war and similar crises, if you could pay for the oil, you could have as much as you wanted. Soon, this will not be the case

  Our second storm, a corollary of the first, is the balance among the ability and willingness of oil exporters to export, the price of oil, and the demand and ability to pay of oil importers. This is not quite the same as the availability of oil, for there will come a point when today’s oil exporters will not be shipping the desired quantities of oil to today’s importers. This reduction in size of the oil trade can be for any of several reasons.

  As production from the giant Cantarell oilfield is dropping rapidly, many forecast that Mexico soon will be out of the oil exporting business. This is not because Mexico’s wants to stop exporting to the US; they simply will not have excess oil to sell abroad. Here we will have a component of storm one directly causing storm two – the reduction in world exports.

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