The shift is in the question itself. For decades, “peak oil” meant one frightening thing: the day the world ran out of the stuff. Now analysts ask when we will stop wanting so much of it.
A prediction that missed
In 1956, the geoscientist M. King Hubbert, then working for Shell, modeled known reserves and projected that global crude production would crest around the year 2000 and then fall away. Producers were rattled. Talk of economic disaster followed.
It did not happen. Output from easily reached reserves did top out early this century, but the industry kept pushing production higher, to 96.4 million barrels per day in 2023, according to DW. Fracking did much of the work. It took off in the United States in the early 2000s, and the US now produces more oil each year than any other country.
So the old phrase stuck around while its meaning slid. Atul Arya, chief energy strategist at S&P Global, put it plainly: fifteen to twenty years ago the worry was running out. “Now, the concern is somewhat different, which is that we’re going to hit a peak or a plateau in demand.”
Two forecasts, far apart
Here is the trend underneath. The International Energy Agency expects demand to flatten at around 102 million barrels per day (bpd) by 2030 in its main scenario, which assumes governments deliver on their climate goals. OPEC sees no peak before 2050 and projects consumption near 123 million bpd by the middle of the century.
The IEA has also brought back a more cautious path, its Current Policies Scenario, under pressure from the Trump administration. In that version demand could climb to 113 million bpd by 2050.
Money is moving too. The IEA’s 2024 World Energy Investment report showed clean technology funding passing fossil fuel investment for the first time in 2023, heading for $2 trillion, against slightly over $1 trillion for coal, gas and oil. Renewables have grown from 19% to more than 30% of the global electricity mix since 2000, according to the think tank Ember. Experts have predicted EVs will take between half and two-thirds of car sales by 2030.
Why oil is not going quietly
Oil companies are not folding. Faye Holder of the think tank Influence Map worked on a study of company claims about renewable targets, and said the data suggested that all companies, except maybe BP, were increasing oil production.
Some sectors will lean on petroleum for a long time. Aviation, deep-sea shipping and petrochemicals are hard to switch, and plastics, lubricants and solvents all start with hydrocarbons. Emerging economies, still growing and urbanizing, may keep demand rising even as richer markets electrify. “All of that is going to help us move away from oil,” Arya said. “But it’s not going to be overnight.”
There is a counter-voice on supply. The IEA warned that older fields could lose about 8% of output a year without steady investment, and the Spanish physicist Antonio Turiel told DW the US fracking boom is close to exhaustion. His own call: a peak “most probably by 2027, in any case before 2030.”
Watch this space. The IEA and OPEC are betting on opposite worlds, and the next few years of EV sales and investment will show which of them has read it better.
Sources
- What is 'peak oil' and when will we reach it?
- Peak oil: Why the world can't break its fossil fuel habit
- Is Petroleum the Future? Oil's Role in the Energy Transition
