25 MARCH 2011 VOL 331

SCIENCE

www.sciencemag.org

1510

FIVE YEARS AGO, MANY OIL EXPERTS SAW

trouble looming. In 10 years or so, they said, oil producers outside the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) would likely be unable to pump oil any faster (

Science

, 18 November 2005, p. 1106). Non -OP EC oil pro duc tio n woul d pe ak, no matter the effort applied. All the high- technology exploration and drilling, all the frontier-pushing bravado of the oil industry would no longer stave off the inevitable as OPEC gains an even stronger hand among the world’ s oil producers. Five years on, it appears those exper ts may have been unduly optimistic—non-OPEC oil production may have been peaking as they spoke. Despite a near tripling of world oil prices, non-OPEC production, which accounts for 60% of world output, hasn’t increased signiﬁcantly since 2004. And many of those same experts, as well as some major oil companies, don’t see it increasing again— ever. In their view, it’s stuck on a ﬂat-topped peak or pl ateau at pre sent levels of p roduc- tion for another decade or so before starting to decline. “Stable [non-OPEC] production is the best we can hope for,” says energy econ- omist Robert Kaufmann of Boston Univer- sity . “I have trouble seeing it increase more. It’s a wake-up call.” Optimists remain. Some experts still see production from new frontiers, such as Kazakhstan, the deep waters off Brazil, and the oil sands of Canada, pushing production above the current plateau in the next few years. But time’ s running out to prove that newly dis- covered ﬁelds and new technology can more than compensate for ﬂagging production from the rapidly aging ﬁelds beyond OPEC.

Running to stay in place

There’s no debate about the reality of the 6-year-and-counting plateau of non-OPEC produc tion. Outpu t sta gnated at ab out 40 m il- lion barrels a day beginning in 2004 after ris- ing from an earlier plateau in the early 1990s, one induced by a low price for oil. But prices have been anything but low lately . They have gone from about $35 a barrel early in the past decade to double and nearly triple that. Nor- mally, higher prices would encourage more productio n, but not this time. Since 2004, “there’s been a tremendous increase in price, yet this is all we get for it, stable produc- tion,” Kaufmann says. “It’s quite stark.” The problem up to this po int , all ag re e, ha s bee n increasing difﬁculties extract- ing conventional oil. That’s the easiest oil to get at, oil that freely ﬂows out of a well of its own accord or with a mini- mum of encouragement, such as pumping it out or pushing it out with water. Production of conventional oil from any one well or field typically increases, peaks, and then goes into decline. Larger pro- ducing region s behave the same way . Produc- tion from the United States, once the world’s largest oil producer, peaked in 1970 as rising output from newly discovered ﬁelds failed to compensate for declines in old ﬁelds. Mex- ico’ s production peaked in 2004 as its huge, aging Cantarell ﬁeld went into steep decline. North Sea pr oduction peaked in 19 99, j ust 28 years after starting up. The same pattern now seems to be emerg- ing across much of the world. “We believe— and pretty much everybody else believes— that non-OPEC [conventional] production has plateaued,” says oil analyst Michael Rodgers, a partner with PFC Energy in Kuala Lumpur. “Arguing that you’re going to get continued and sustained growth of conven- tional oil is a very hard case to make.” PFC Energy has just done a complete reassessment of the prospects for non-OPEC conventional production, he says. As in most oil outlooks, a country-by-country or even ﬁeld-by-ﬁeld survey of what producers are planning for the next 5 to 10 years was combined with an educated guess of how much oil remains to be disco vered in each reg ion. That forecast of added production is bal- anced against how fast production from exist- ing ﬁelds is declining. In the past decade, ana- lysts have realized that rather than the 2% to 3% per year decline once assumed, produc- tion from existing ﬁelds is declining 4% to 5% per year. Some believe the depletion is even faster. The balance between added and declining production, in the PFC Energy assessment, is a plateau, though the pla- teau may undulate from year to year. “You

The hard way.

Depletion of con- ventional oil fields outside of OPEC is driving the mining of oil sands in Alberta, Canada.

C R E D I T : N O R M B E T T S / L A N D O V

Outside of OPEC’s vast resources, oil production has leveled off, and it’s looking like it may never rise again

NEWS

FOCUS

Peak Oil Production May Already Be Here

Published by AAAS