OVERVIEW

The last chapter ended with a sort of body-blow: it was the punch line. Conventional oil production is about to peak, and there is nothing we can do about it. The scenarios considering the consequences of this discontinuity in the way the world lives were difficult to write, and may be hard to accept: they sound extreme and alarmist. Surely, we ask, things are not as bad as they seem; surely some happy solution will be found. Perhaps so, but anyway, why not sit up and think about it?

I won t belabour the point further. It is time to step back from the main theme, and fill in some of the other supporting data and ideas, before returning to a synthesis in the final chapter.

As discussed in Chapter 2, petroleum is a family of hydrocarbons in gaseous, liquid and solid states. Taken together, and ignoring the size of individual accumulations, the total resource is enormous. Economists, who fail to understand the distinctions and differing depletion patterns of these substances, are misled into stating:

Total hydrocarbon resources with the potential to produce liquid fuels are so large that they can be considered infinite for the purposes of analysis . ^{[1 ]}

For them, the resource is treated as near infinite, and production is just a matter of supply, demand, profit, investment and technology ^[2]. In fact, these several species of hydrocarbons have very different characteristics and depletion patterns, which need to be taken into account when forecasting supply.

In...