Proceedings of the
Second International Energy 2030 Conference,
November 4-5, 2008, Abu Dhabi, U.A.E.
How High Oil Prices Help to Shift Peak Oil into the Future
Pawel A. Nawrocki
The Petroleum Institute, UAE
Dalton Garis
The Petroleum Institute, UAE
Abstract
Some geologists are forecasting the end of the oil age in the next few decades. The optimists, who see
oil lasting for at least fifty more years, are mainly those who put their faith in new technology for finding
and extracting oil. But the pessimists say that even taking into account the best exploration efforts and the
discovery of new fields like the Gulf of Mexico and other finds, sometime between 2010 and 2020 the
gush of oil from wells around the world will peak at 95-110 million barrels per day, then begin a steady,
inevitable decline.
Reviewing different peak oil hypothesis and using Canadian oil sands as example, this presentation
shows how high oil prices are helping to shift peak oil well into an indefinite future. Oil will never run
out, not because oil reserves are unlimited but because rising oil prices, the result of scarcities, has a
powerful influence on supplies: new technology becomes affordable and increases conventional crude oil
reserve production potentials, and also vastly increases commercially viable non-conventional reserves,
thus stretching out the total production potential of oil to well into the 21st century.
