Thursday, March 26, 2015

Rest of World Is Past Peak Oil (*)

Here is world oil production per capita, in barrels per person per year. The green curve includes US oil production and population, and the red line omits them. It seems only US production is keeping the world above Peak Oil(*).


* I don't think it's quite this simple, though, because if the US hadn't increased its production in recent years, other countries, most notably Saudi Arabia, might have stepped up their production to keep the red curve reasonably flat after 2006. And other countries might have taken up fracking more than they have, even though it's controversial. I'd suspect they probably will do more fracking, more than they are already, if oil production starts to seriously decline.

data sources:
monthly oil production, by country and for the world
World Population
US Population

1 comment:

PaulS said...

This seems a little incongruous with the halving of oil prices over the past 6 months.

Is supply and demand broken?