TABLE OF CONTENTS The last chapter was rather heavy going technical stuff, but important reading all the same if one is to gain an appreciation of the physical constraints to oil production. There are not great underground caverns full of oil waiting to be tapped. It accumulates in the minute pore space of rocks under complex geological circumstances, which only rarely come together in the right combination. One weak link in the geological chain converts a promising prospect into an expensive dry hole. In the last chapter, I explained how flush oil generation occurs when the critical temperature is reached in the source-rocks, and how it progressively consumes the amount of organic raw material available to convert. The result is a classic bell-shaped curve of generation, starting at zero, rising to a peak and then falling back to zero. This is a pattern which will recur in this story in different contexts: it is well to get used to it, for it is immensely important.
The world is likely to reach peak production around the end of the Century, only a few years away. Our experience in most countries has been of the left-hand side of the curve, when production was rising. We can learn much from it before we face its mirror image when production makes its inevitable decline.
While many of the details are fuzzy, no one can doubt the generality of the picture of the oil age in Figure 3-1 [1].
