The one thing that international bankers don't want to hear is that the second Great Depression may be round the corner. But earlier this month, a group of ultra-conservative Swiss financiers asked a retired English petroleum geologist living in Ireland to tell them about the beginning of the end of the oil age.
They called Colin Campbell, who helped to found the London-based Oil Depletion Analysis Center because he is an industry man through and through, has no financial agenda and has spent most of a lifetime on the front line of oil exploration on three continents. He was chief geologist for Amoco, a vice-president of Fina and has worked for BP, Texaco, Shell, ChevronTexaco and Exxon in a dozen different countries.
"Don't worry about oil running out; it won't for very many years," Campbell told the bankers in a message that he has repeated to businessmen, academics and investment analysts at a conference in Edinburgh this week.
"The issue is the long downward slope that opens on the other side of peak production. Oil and gas dominate our lives, and their decline will change the world in radical and unpredictable ways," said Campbell, who holds a doctorate from Oxford.
Campbell reckons global peak production of conventional oil -- the kind associated with gushing oil wells -- is approaching fast, perhaps even next year.
His calculations are based on historical and present production data, published reserves and discoveries of companies and governments, estimates of reserves lodged with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, speeches by oil chiefs and a deep knowledge of how the industry works.
"About 944 billion barrels of oil has so far been extracted, some 764 billion remains extractable in known fields, or reserves, and a further 142 billion of reserves are classed as `yet-to-find,' meaning what oil is expected to be discovered. If this is so, then the overall oil peak arrives next year," he said.
If he is correct, then global oil production can be expected to decline steadily at about 2 percent to 3 percent a year and the cost of everything from travel, heating, agriculture, trade and anything made of plastic rises. And the scramble to control oil resources intensifies.
As one US analyst said last week: "Just kiss your lifestyle goodbye."
But the Campbell analysis is way off the much more optimistic official figures. The US Geological Survey (USGS) states that reserves in 2000 (its latest figures) of recoverable oil were about 3 trillion barrels and that peak production will not come for about 30 years.
The International Energy Agency (IEA) believes that oil will peak between "2013 and 2037" and Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iraq and Iran, four countries with much of the world's known reserves, report little if any depletion of reserves.
Meanwhile, the oil companies -- which do not make public estimates of their own "peak oil" -- say there is no shortage of oil and gas for the long term.
"The world holds enough proved reserves for 40 years of supply and at least 60 years of gas supply at current consumption rates," BP said last week.
Indeed, almost every year for 150 years, the oil industry has produced more than it did the year before, and predictions of oil running out or peaking have always been proved wrong. Today, the industry is producing about 83 million barrels a day, with big new fields in Azerbaijan, Angola, Algeria, the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico and elsewhere soon expected on stream.
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