The End of Cheap Oil

Author(s): Colin J. Campbell and Jean H. Laherrère

Source: Scientific American , Vol. 278, No. 3 (MARCH 1998), pp. 78-83
Published by: Scientific American, a division of Nature America, Inc.
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/26057708

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 The End of Cheap Oil
Global production of conventional oil will begin to decline
sooner than most people think, probably within 10 years
by Colin J. Campbell and Jean H. Laherrère

I n 1973 and 1979 a pair of sudden

price increases rudely awakened the
industrial world to its dependence on
cheap crude oil. Prices first tripled in re-
sponse to an Arab embargo and then
Middle Eastern members of the Orga-
nization of Petroleum Exporting Coun-
tries (OPEC) were able to hike prices
not because oil was growing scarce but
because they had managed to corner 36
could remain plentiful and cheap for 43
more years—probably longer, because
official charts show reserves growing.
Unfortunately, this appraisal makes
three critical errors. First, it relies on dis-
nearly doubled again when Iran de- percent of the market. Later, when de- torted estimates of reserves. A second
throned its Shah, sending the major mand sagged, and the flow of fresh mistake is to pretend that production
economies sputtering into recession. Alaskan and North Sea oil weakened will remain constant. Third and most
Many analysts warned that these crises OPEC’s economic stranglehold, prices important, conventional wisdom erro-
proved that the world would soon run collapsed. neously assumes that the last bucket of
out of oil. Yet they were wrong. The next oil crunch will not be so oil can be pumped from the ground just
Their dire predictions were emotion- temporary. Our analysis of the discov- as quickly as the barrels of oil gushing
al and political reactions; even at the ery and production of oil fields around from wells today. In fact, the rate at
time, oil experts knew that they had no the world suggests that within the next which any well—or any country—can
scientific basis. Just a few years earlier decade, the supply of conventional oil produce oil always rises to a maximum
oil explorers had discovered enormous will be unable to keep up with demand. and then, when about half the oil is gone,
new oil provinces on the north slope of This conclusion contradicts the picture begins falling gradually back to zero.
Alaska and below the North Sea off the one gets from oil industry reports, which From an economic perspective, when
coast of Europe. By 1973 the world had boasted of 1,020 billion barrels of oil the world runs completely out of oil is
consumed, according to many experts’ (Gbo) in “proved” reserves at the start thus not directly relevant: what matters
best estimates, only about one eighth of of 1998. Dividing that figure by the is when production begins to taper off.
its endowment of readily accessible crude current production rate of about 23.6 Beyond that point, prices will rise un-
oil (so-called conventional oil). The five Gbo a year might suggest that crude oil less demand declines commensurately.

HISTORY OF OIL PRODUCTION, from the first commercial American well in

1859 Titusville, Pa. (left), to derricks bristling above the Los Angeles basin (below), be-
gan with steady growth in the U.S. (red line). But domestic production began to
decline after 1970, and restrictions in the flow of Middle Eastern oil in 1973 and
1979 led to inflation and shortages (near and center right). More recently, the
Persian Gulf War, with its burning oil fields (far right), reminded the industrial
world of its dependence on Middle Eastern oil production (gray line).

1920s
CORBIS-BETTMANN

CORBIS-BETTMANN

78 Scientific American March 1998 Copyright 1998 Scientific American, Inc. The End of Cheap Oil

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 Using several different techniques to es- tistics because companies meter the oil In practice, companies and countries
timate the current reserves of conven- as it flows from their wells. The record are often deliberately vague about the
tional oil and the amount still left to be of production is not perfect (for exam- likelihood of the reserves they report,
discovered, we conclude that the de- ple, the two billion barrels of Kuwaiti preferring instead to publicize whichev-
cline will begin before 2010. oil wastefully burned by Iraq in 1991 is er figure, within a P10 to P90 range,
usually not included in official statistics), best suits them. Exaggerated estimates
Digging for the True Numbers but errors are relatively easy to spot can, for instance, raise the price of an
and rectify. Most experts agree that the oil company’s stock.
e have spent most of our careers industry had removed just over 800 The members of OPEC have faced an
W exploring for oil, studying reserve
figures and estimating the amount of oil
Gbo from the earth at the end of 1997. even greater temptation to inflate their
Getting good estimates of reserves is reports because the higher their reserves,
left to discover, first while employed at much harder, however. Almost all the the more oil they are allowed to export.
major oil companies and later as inde- publicly available statistics are taken National companies, which have exclu-
pendent consultants. Over the years, from surveys conducted by the Oil and sive oil rights in the main OPEC coun-
we have come to appreciate that the rel- Gas Journal and World Oil. Each year tries, need not (and do not) release de-
evant statistics are far more complicat- these two trade journals query oil firms tailed statistics on each field that could
ed than they first appear. and governments around the world. be used to verify the country’s total re-
Consider, for example, three vital They then publish whatever production serves. There is thus good reason to sus-
numbers needed to project future oil and reserve numbers they receive but pect that when, during the late 1980s,
production. The first is the tally of how are not able to verify them. six of the 11 OPEC nations increased
much oil has been extracted to date, a The results, which are often accepted their reserve figures by colossal amounts,

JENNIFER C. CHRISTIANSEN; SOURCE: JEAN H. LAHERRÈRE

figure known as cumulative production. uncritically, contain systematic errors. ranging from 42 to 197 percent, they
The second is an estimate of reserves, For one, many of the reported figures did so only to boost their export quotas.
the amount that companies can pump are unrealistic. Estimating reserves is an Previous OPEC estimates, inherited
out of known oil fields before having to inexact science to begin with, so petro- from private companies before govern-
abandon them. Finally, one must have leum engineers assign a probability to ments took them over, had probably
an educated guess at the quantity of their assessments. For example, if, as been conservative, P90 numbers. So
conventional oil that remains to be dis- geologists estimate, there is a 90 percent some upward revision was warranted.
covered and exploited. Together they chance that the Oseberg field in Norway But no major new discoveries or tech-
add up to ultimate recovery, the total contains 700 million barrels of recover- nological breakthroughs justi-
number of barrels that will have been able oil but only a 10 percent fied the addition of a stag-
extracted when production ceases many chance that it will yield 2,500 mil- gering 287 Gbo. That in-
decades from now. lion more barrels, then the lower crease is more than all
The obvious way to gather these num- figure should be cited as the so- the oil ever discovered
bers is to look them up in any of several called P90 estimate (P90 for in the U.S.—plus 40
publications. That approach works well “probability 90 percent”) and percent. Non-OPEC
enough for cumulative production sta- the higher as the P10 reserves. countries, of course,
1973 1979

1973
1991
UPI/CORBIS-BETTMANN

OIL PRODUCTION
IN THE U.S.
BRUNO BARBEY Magnum Photos

AND CANADA
UPI/CORBIS-BETTMANN

OIL PRODUCTION 1979

IN THE PERSIAN GULF
1991

The End of Cheap Oil Copyright 1998 Scientific American, Inc. Scientific American March 1998 79

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 FLOW OF OIL starts to fall
COURTESY OF THE SOCIETY OF EXPLORATION GEOPHYSICISTS

JENNIFER C. CHRISTIANSEN; LAURIE GRACE

from any large region when
TOTAL FOR
about half the crude is gone.

ANNUAL OIL PRODUCTION

ENTIRE REGION
Adding the output of fields of

(INCREASING YIELD)
various sizes and ages (green
curves at right) usually yields
a bell-shaped production curve
for the region as a whole. M.
King Hubbert (left), a geolo- INDIVIDUAL
gist with Shell Oil, exploited WELLS
this fact in 1956 to predict cor-
rectly that oil from the lower
48 American states would peak 0
around 1969. 0 YEARS 40

are not above fudging their numbers ei- answer, because adding what is 90 per- our value represents the amount most
ther: 59 nations stated in 1997 that their cent likely for each field, as is done in likely to come out of known oil fields,
reserves were unchanged from 1996. the U.S., does not in fact yield what is whereas the larger number is supposedly
Because reserves naturally drop as old 90 percent likely for a country or the en- a cautious estimate of proved reserves.
fields are drained and jump when new tire planet. On the contrary, summing For the purposes of calculating when
fields are discovered, perfectly stable many P90 reserve estimates always un- oil production will crest, even more crit-
numbers year after year are implausible. derstates the amount of proved oil in a ical than the size of the world’s reserves
region. The only correct way to total is the size of ultimate recovery—all the
Unproved Reserves up reserve numbers is to add the mean, cheap oil there is to be had. In order to
or average, estimates of oil in each field. estimate that, we need to know wheth-
nother source of systematic error in In practice, the median estimate, often er, and how fast, reserves are moving up
A the commonly accepted statistics is
that the definition of reserves varies
called “proved and probable,” or P50
reserves, is more widely used and is good
or down. It is here that the official sta-
tistics become dangerously misleading.
widely from region to region. In the enough. The P50 value is the number of
U.S., the Securities and Exchange Com- barrels of oil that are as likely as not to Diminishing Returns
mission allows companies to call re- come out of a well during its lifetime,
serves “proved” only if the oil lies near assuming prices remain within a limited ccording to most accounts, world
a producing well and there is “reason-
able certainty” that it can be recovered
range. Errors in P50 estimates tend to
cancel one another out.
A oil reserves have marched steadily
upward over the past 20 years. Extend-
profitably at current oil prices, using We were able to work around many ing that apparent trend into the future,
existing technology. So a proved reserve of the problems plaguing estimates of one could easily conclude, as the U.S.
estimate in the U.S. is roughly equal to conventional reserves by using a large Energy Information Administration has,
a P90 estimate. body of statistics maintained by Petro- that oil production will continue to rise
Regulators in most other countries do consultants in Geneva. This informa- unhindered for decades to come, in-
not enforce particular oil-reserve defini- tion, assembled over 40 years from myr- creasing almost two thirds by 2020.
tions. For many years, the former Soviet iad sources, covers some 18,000 oil fields Such growth is an illusion. About 80
countries have routinely released wildly worldwide. It, too, contains some dubi- percent of the oil produced today flows
optimistic figures—essentially P10 re- ous reports, but we did our best to cor- from fields that were found before 1973,
serves. Yet analysts have often misinter- rect these sporadic errors. and the great majority of them are de-
preted these as estimates of “proved” According to our calculations, the clining. In the 1990s oil companies have
reserves. World Oil reckoned reserves world had at the end of 1996 approxi- discovered an average of seven Gbo a
in the former Soviet Union amounted mately 850 Gbo of conventional oil in year; last year they drained more than
to 190 Gbo in 1996, whereas the Oil P50 reserves—substantially less than three times as much. Yet official figures
and Gas Journal put the number at 57 the 1,019 Gbo reported in the Oil and indicated that proved reserves did not
Gbo. This large discrepancy shows just Gas Journal and the 1,160 Gbo esti- fall by 16 Gbo, as one would expect—
how elastic these numbers can be. mated by World Oil. The difference is rather they expanded by 11 Gbo. One
Using only P90 estimates is not the actually greater than it appears because reason is that several dozen governments

EARTH’S CONVENTIONAL CRUDE OIL is almost half gone. out of known fields) and future discoveries together will provide
Reserves (defined here as the amount as likely as not to come little more than what has already been burned.

UNDISCOVERED: RESERVES:
150 BILLION BARRELS 850 BILLION BARRELS
LAURIE GRACE

80 Scientific American March 1998 Copyright 1998 Scientific American, Inc. The End of Cheap Oil

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 ANNUAL OIL PRODUCTION (BILLIONS OF BARRELS
GLOBAL PRODUCTION OF OIL, both 30

LAURIE GRACE; SOURCE: JEAN H. LAHERRÈRE

conventional and unconventional (red), WORLD
recovered after falling in 1973 and 1979. WORLD OUTSIDE PERSIAN GULF
But a more permanent decline is less than 25 PERSIAN GULF
U.S. AND CANADA
10 years away, according to the authors’ FORMER SOVIET UNION
model, based in part on multiple Hubbert U.K. AND NORWAY
curves (lighter lines). U.S. and Canadian 20
oil (brown) topped out in 1972; produc-
tion in the former Soviet Union (yellow)
has fallen 45 percent since 1987. A crest in 15
the oil produced outside the Persian Gulf
region (purple) now appears imminent.
10

opted not to report declines in their re- 5

serves, perhaps to enhance their political
cachet and their ability to obtain loans. 0
A more important cause of the expan- 1930 1940 1950 1960 1970 1980 1990 2000 2010 2020 2030 2040 2050
sion lies in revisions: oil companies re-
placed earlier estimates of the reserves
left in many fields with higher numbers. rate continued its decline uninterrupt- tions continued producing at full capac-
For most purposes, such amendments ed. There is only so much crude oil in ity. Our analysis reveals that a number
are harmless, but they seriously distort the world, and the industry has found of the largest producers, including Nor-
forecasts extrapolated from published about 90 percent of it. way and the U.K., will reach their peaks
reports. around the turn of the millennium un-
To judge accurately how much oil ex- Predicting the Inevitable less they sharply curtail production. By
plorers will uncover in the future, one 2002 or so the world will rely on Mid-
has to backdate every revision to the redicting when oil production will dle East nations, particularly five near
year in which the field was first discov-
ered—not to the year in which a compa-
P stop rising is relatively straightfor-
ward once one has a good estimate of
the Persian Gulf (Iran, Iraq, Kuwait,
Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emi-
ny or country corrected an earlier esti- how much oil there is left to produce. rates), to fill in the gap between dwin-
mate. Doing so reveals that global dis- We simply apply a refinement of a tech- dling supply and growing demand. But
covery peaked in the early 1960s and nique first published in 1956 by M. once approximately 900 Gbo have been
has been falling steadily ever since. By King Hubbert. Hubbert observed that consumed, production must soon begin
extending the trend to zero, we can in any large region, unrestrained extrac- to fall. Barring a global recession, it
make a good guess at how much oil the tion of a finite resource rises along a bell- seems most likely that world produc-
industry will ultimately find. shaped curve that peaks when about tion of conventional oil will peak dur-
We have used other methods to esti- half the resource is gone. To demon- ing the first decade of the 21st century.
mate the ultimate recovery of conven- strate his theory, Hubbert fitted a bell Perhaps surprisingly, that prediction
tional oil for each country [see box on curve to production statistics and pro- does not shift much even if our esti-
next two pages], and we calculate that jected that crude oil production in the mates are a few hundred billion barrels
the oil industry will be able to recover lower 48 U.S. states would rise for 13 high or low. Craig Bond Hatfield of the
only about another 1,000 billion bar- more years, then crest in 1969, give or University of Toledo, for example, has
rels of conventional oil. This number, take a year. He was right: production conducted his own analysis based on a
though great, is little more than the 800 peaked in 1970 and has continued to 1991 estimate by the U.S. Geological
billion barrels that have already been follow Hubbert curves with only minor Survey of 1,550 Gbo remaining—55
extracted. deviations. The flow of oil from several percent higher than our figure. Yet he
It is important to realize that spend- other regions, such as the former Soviet similarly concludes that the world will
ing more money on oil exploration will Union and the collection of all oil pro- hit maximum oil production within the
not change this situation. After the price ducers outside the Middle East, also fol- next 15 years. John D. Edwards of the
of crude hit all-time highs in the early lows Hubbert curves quite faithfully. University of Colorado published last
1980s, explorers developed new tech- The global picture is more complicat- August one of the most optimistic re-
nology for finding and recovering oil, ed, because the Middle East members of cent estimates of oil remaining: 2,036
and they scoured the world for new OPEC deliberately reined back their oil Gbo. (Edwards concedes that the indus-
fields. They found few: the discovery exports in the 1970s, while other na- try has only a 5 percent chance of at-

PRODUCED:
800 BILLION BARRELS

The End of Cheap Oil Copyright 1998 Scientific American, Inc. Scientific American March 1998 81

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 How Much Oil Is Left to Find? off the coast of Britain, for example, will yield about 420 mil-
lion barrels (a ). Second, we plotted the amount of oil discov-

W e combined several techniques to conclude that about

1,000 billion barrels of conventional oil remain to be
produced. First, we extrapolated published production figures
ered so far in some regions against the cumulative number of
exploratory wells drilled there. Because larger fields tend to
be found first—they are simply too large to miss—the curve
for older oil fields that have begun to decline. The Thistle field rises rapidly and then flattens, eventually reaching a theo-

We can predict the amount of remaining oil ...from the diminishing returns on exploration in larger regions...

CUMULATIVE OIL DISCOVERED

a from the decline of aging fields ... b

(BILLIONS OF BARRELS)
ANNUAL OIL PRODUCTION

300
(MILLIONS OF BARRELS)

50 FORMER
SOVIET UNION THEORETICAL
40
200 MAXIMUM
30
20
100
AFRICA PRACTICAL
10
LIMIT
0 0
0 50 100 150 200 250 300 350 400 450 500 0 5,000 10,000 15,000 20,000
OIL PRODUCED TO DATE (MILLIONS OF BARRELS) CUMULATIVE NUMBER OF EXPLORATORY WELLS

taining that very high goal.) Even so, new technologies have steadily increased Last, economists like to point out that
his calculations suggest that convention- the fraction of oil that can be recovered the world contains enormous caches of
al oil will top out in 2020. from fields in a basin—the so-called re- unconventional oil that can substitute
covery factor. In the 1960s oil compa- for crude oil as soon as the price rises
Smoothing the Peak nies assumed as a rule of thumb that high enough to make them profitable.
only 30 percent of the oil in a field was There is no question that the resources
actors other than major economic typically recoverable; now they bank are ample: the Orinoco oil belt in Vene-
F changes could speed or delay the
point at which oil production begins to
on an average of 40 or 50 percent. That zuela has been assessed to contain a
progress will continue and will extend staggering 1.2 trillion barrels of the
decline. Three in particular have often global reserves for many years to come, sludge known as heavy oil. Tar sands
led economists and academic geologists the argument runs. and shale deposits in Canada and the
to dismiss concerns about future oil Of course, advanced technologies will former Soviet Union may contain the
production with naive optimism. buy a bit more time before production equivalent of more than 300 billion
First, some argue, huge deposits of oil starts to fall [see “Oil Production in the barrels of oil [see “Mining for Oil,” by
may lie undetected in far-off corners of 21st Century,” by Roger N. Anderson, Richard L. George, on page 84]. Theo-
the globe. In fact, that is very unlikely. on page 86]. But most of the apparent retically, these unconventional oil re-
Exploration has pushed the frontiers improvement in recovery factors is an serves could quench the world’s thirst
back so far that only extremely deep wa- artifact of reporting. As oil fields grow for liquid fuels as conventional oil pass-
ter and polar regions remain to be fully old, their owners often deploy newer es its prime. But the industry will be
tested, and even their prospects are now technology to slow their decline. The hard-pressed for the time and money
reasonably well understood. Theoreti- falloff also allows engineers to gauge needed to ramp up production of un-
cal advances in geochemistry and geo- the size of the field more accurately and conventional oil quickly enough.
physics have made it possible to map to correct previous underestimation—in Such substitutes for crude oil might
productive and prospective fields with particular P90 estimates that by defini- also exact a high environmental price.
impressive accuracy. As a result, large tion were 90 percent like-
tracts can be condemned as barren. ly to be exceeded. 1,200 AND GAS JOURNAL AND U.S. GEOLOGICAL SURVEY
LAURIE GRACE; SOURCE: PETROCONSULTANTS, OIL

Much of the deepwater realm, for ex- Another reason not to BACKDATED RESERVES
BILLIONS OF BARRELS

ample, has been shown to be absolutely pin too much hope on 1,000
nonprospective for geologic reasons. better recovery is that oil 800 REPORTED
What about the much touted Caspi- companies routinely
600 RESERVES
an Sea deposits? Our models project count on technological
that oil production from that region progress when they com- 400
will grow until around 2010. We agree pute their reserve esti- DISCOVERIES
with analysts at the USGS World Oil As- mates. In truth, advanced 200
sessment program and elsewhere who technologies can offer lit-
rank the total resources there as roughly tle help in draining the 1940 1950 1960 1970 1980 1990 2000
equivalent to those of the North Sea— largest basins of oil, those GROWTH IN OIL RESERVES since 1980 is an illusion
that is, perhaps 50 Gbo but certainly not onshore in the Middle caused by belated corrections to oil-field estimates. Back-
several hundreds of billions as some- East where the oil needs dating the revisions to the year in which the fields were dis-
times reported in the media. no assistance to gush from covered reveals that reserves have been falling because of a
A second common rejoinder is that the ground. steady decline in newfound oil (blue).

82 Scientific American March 1998 Copyright 1998 Scientific American, Inc. The End of Cheap Oil

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 retical maximum: for Africa, 192 Gbo. But the time and cost of terestingly, galaxies, urban populations and other natural ag-
exploration impose a more practical limit of perhaps 165 Gbo glomerations also seem to fall along such parabolas.) Finally,
(b). Third, we analyzed the distribution of oil-field sizes in the we checked our estimates by matching our projections for oil
Gulf of Mexico and other provinces. Ranked according to size production in large areas, such as the world outside the Per-
and then graphed on a logarithmic scale, the fields tend to sian Gulf region, to the rise and fall of oil discovery in those
fall along a parabola that grows predictably over time (c ). (In- places decades earlier (d ). —C.J.C. and J.H.L.

...by extrapolating the size of new fields into the future... ...and by matching production to earlier discovery trends.
c d

LAURIE GRACE; SOURCE: JEAN H. LAHERRÈRE

1000

OIL FOUND OR PRODUCED

DISCOVERY YEAR
(MILLIONS OF BARRELS)

(BILLIONS OF BARRELS)
OUTSIDE MIDDLE EAST
OIL INITIALLY IN FIELD

1935 1955 1975 1995

100 40

PROJECTED 30 DISCOVERY
10
1959 20 HUBBERT
1 1969 PRODUCTION
1979 MODEL
10
1993
0.1 0
LARGEST 10TH 100TH 1,000TH SMALLEST 1930 1950 1970 1990 2010 2030
FIELD LARGEST LARGEST LARGEST FIELD PRODUCTION YEAR

Tar sands typically emerge from strip mand for oil will increase 60 percent (to tration to increase funding for energy
mines. Extracting oil from these sands about 40 Gbo a year) by 2020. research by $1 billion over the next five
and shales creates air pollution. The The switch from growth to decline in years. That is a small step in the right
Orinoco sludge contains heavy metals oil production will thus almost certain- direction, one that must be followed by
and sulfur that must be removed. So ly create economic and political tension. giant leaps from the private sector.
governments may restrict these indus- Unless alternatives to crude oil quickly The world is not running out of oil—
tries from growing as fast as they could. prove themselves, the market share of at least not yet. What our society does
In view of these potential obstacles, our the OPEC states in the Middle East will face, and soon, is the end of the abun-
skeptical estimate is that only 700 Gbo rise rapidly. Within two years, these na- dant and cheap oil on which all indus-
will be produced from unconventional tions’ share of the global oil business trial nations depend. SA

reserves over the next 60 years. will pass 30 percent, nearing the level
reached during the oil-price shocks of
On the Down Side the 1970s. By 2010 their share will quite
probably hit 50 percent.
eanwhile global demand for oil is The world could thus see radical in- The Authors
M currently rising at more than 2
percent a year. Since 1985, energy use is
creases in oil prices. That alone might
be sufficient to curb demand, flattening
COLIN J. CAMPBELL and JEAN H. LA-
HERRÈRE have each worked in the oil in-
up about 30 percent in Latin America, production for perhaps 10 years. (De- dustry for more than 40 years. After com-
pleting his Ph.D. in geology at the University
40 percent in Africa and 50 percent in mand fell more than 10 percent after
of Oxford, Campbell worked for Texaco as
Asia. The Energy Information Adminis- the 1979 shock and took 17 years to an exploration geologist and then at Amoco
tration forecasts that worldwide de- recover.) But by 2010 or so, many Mid- as chief geologist for Ecuador. His decade-
dle Eastern nations will themselves be long study of global oil-production trends
past the midpoint. World production has led to two books and numerous papers.
800 will then have to fall. Laherrère’s early work on seismic refraction
LAURIE GRACE; SOURCE: OIL AND GAS JOURNAL

With sufficient preparation, however, surveys contributed to the discovery of

700 Africa’s largest oil field. At Total, a French
REPORTED OIL RESERVES

the transition to the post-oil economy

(BILLIONS OF BARRELS)

oil company, he supervised exploration tech-

600 need not be traumatic. If advanced niques worldwide. Both Campbell and La-
SAUDI ARABIA methods of producing liquid fuels from herrère are currently associated with Petro-
500
natural gas can be made profitable and consultants in Geneva.
400 IRAN scaled up quickly, gas could become the
U.A.E. next source of transportation fuel [see Further Reading
300
“Liquid Fuels from Natural Gas,” by Updated Hubbert Curves Analyze
200 IRAQ Safaa A. Fouda, on page 92]. Safer nu- World Oil Supply. L. F. Ivanhoe in World
100 KUWAIT clear power, cheaper renewable energy, Oil, Vol. 217, No. 11, pages 91–94; No-
and oil conservation programs could all vember 1996.
VENEZUELA The Coming Oil Crisis. Colin J. Camp-
0 help postpone the inevitable decline of
1980 1985 1990 1995 bell. Multi-Science Publishing and Petro-
conventional oil.
consultants, Brentwood, England, 1997.
SUSPICIOUS JUMP in reserves reported by Countries should begin planning and Oil Back on the Global Agenda. Craig
six OPEC members added 300 billion bar- investing now. In November a panel of Bond Hatfield in Nature, Vol. 387, page
rels of oil to official reserve tallies yet fol- energy experts appointed by President 121; May 8, 1997.
lowed no major discovery of new fields. Bill Clinton strongly urged the adminis-

The End of Cheap Oil Copyright 1998 Scientific American, Inc. Scientific American March 1998 83

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