Chris Nelder at Energy & Capital found a presentation by the EIA's Glen Sweetnam. And inside that presentation, he found this graph.
Source: Glen Sweetnam, "Meeting the World's Demand for Liquid Fuels - A Roundtable Discussion," EIA 2009 Energy Conference, April 7, 2009, Washington, DC
I presume that "unidentified projects" refers mostly to undiscovered oil, meaning that Sweetnam has no idea where this oil will come from. As Nelder points out, if the EIA, which is data & analysis section of the Department of Energy, is concerned about the world's future oil supply, they haven't bothered to tell anybody of consequence inside or outside the Beltway—at least as far as we know.
When you combine Sweetnam's chilling graph with the oil discoveries trend, you begin to understand why a whole lot of people, including yours truly, are concerned about "peak oil."
Taken from Hart & Skrebowski's Peak Oil: A Detailed and Transparent Analysis. The original can be found somewhere among the presentations at IHS Energy. This graph is a bit dated, and does not include the large discoveries (perhaps 50-80 billion barrels) made in deepwater offshore Brazil
The situation is far more complicated than I've described here, but there is nothing I've left out that gets us off the hook. The U.S. military recently warned that an oil output dip may cause massive shortages by 2015—
The U.S. military has warned that surplus oil production capacity could disappear within two years and there could be serious shortages by 2015 with a significant economic and political impact.
The energy crisis outlined in a Joint Operating Environment report from the US Joint Forces Command, comes as the price of petrol in Britain reaches record levels and the cost of crude is predicted to soon top $100 a barrel.
"By 2012, surplus oil production capacity could entirely disappear, and as early as 2015, the shortfall in output could reach nearly 10 million barrels per day," says the report, which has a foreword by a senior commander, General James N Mattis.
It adds: "While it is difficult to predict precisely what economic, political, and strategic effects such a shortfall might produce, it surely would reduce the prospects for growth in both the developing and developed worlds. Such an economic slowdown would exacerbate other unresolved tensions, push fragile and failing states further down the path toward collapse, and perhaps have serious economic impact on both China and India."
The US military says its views cannot be taken as US government policy but admits they are meant to provide the Joint Forces with "an intellectual foundation upon which we will construct the concept to guide out future force developments."
Personally, I don't think it's very hard to predict what the consequences of a 10 million barrel-per-day shortfall in 2015 would be. There would be world-wide Chaos. Widespread panic. Wars over petroleum. Let your imagination run wild.
Of course, there are all sorts of assumptions in the military's (undoubtedly) worst-case scenario, and without knowing what they are, it's hard to assess its credibility. On the other hand, far less dire (but still bad) scenarios would certainly result in large economic dislocations all over this Planet We Call Home.
The military says their worst-case scenario can not be taken as U.S. government policy. That's clearly true because the U.S. government has no policy to deal with future oil supply shortfalls. Our military feels the need to be prepared, but our politicians are only interested in the next election.
I wrote about this kind of stuff for years, but I finally gave up. The Powers That Be ignored it all. They wore me down. They won. You lose.
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