Independent Business Report Confirms: Peak Oil is Upon Us
The independent and private business-funded UK Industry Taskforce on Peak Oil and Energy Security (ITPOES) has confirmed the accuracy of the British National Party’s predictions about peak oil, and has warned of an oil shortage by 2015.
In a report “Briefing Note on Deepwater Production November 2010,” ITOPES warns that the recent Gulf Oils deep water oil spill disaster has highlighted the world’s shrinking access to oil deposits.While the Gulf oil well which had to be closed, called the Macondo deepwater oil field, was in relative terms quite small, the ITPOES report said, the reality is that by 2015, deepwater offshore oil production will have to provide 29 percent of new oil supplies.
This will result from a combination of increased demand — mainly from India and China — and slowly reducing traditional oil fields, which, the report says, are currently declining in some areas by as much as 4,5 percent every year.
The significance of the Mexican oil disaster, ITPOES said, was that delays caused to other deepwater oil field development caused by increased legislative environmental protection and engineering costs, could “create spare capacity falls and oil price rises.”
ITPOES, which is funded by (amongst others), Virgin, Stagecoach and Scottish and Southern Electricity, said that even a six-month delay to future deepwater oil production would lower surplus oil supplies for 2015 from three million barrels to two million.
The new briefing note was an update on the taskforce’s February report, which predicted that “the next five years will see us face another crunch — the oil crunch”.
The new ITPOES report said that Britain is “running out of time to implement the necessary measures to both protect the UK economy from the threat of peak oil production, and make the necessary switch to more sustainable energy sources.
“Without a strong and coordinated response from Government to protect the UK economy and society from rising prices, we will see the cost of travel, food, heating and retail goods rise which will impact British businesses and citizens alike,” the report said.
Meanwhile, the International Energy Agency, in its annual report titled “World Energy Outlook,” said that the global crude oil production peak had in fact already been reached-more than four years ago.
According to the IEA, international demand has since fallen slightly due to the recent global economic downturn, but once economies around the world have recovered, the IEA said daily crude production alone will no longer be sufficient to meet their needs.
The report went on to say that that daily global oil production will "plateau" at around 68 million barrels per day by 2035, as total energy demand increases by more than 35 percent over the same period.
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