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Bp Says We'Ve Already Reached Peak Oil:
BP is saying the quiet part loud: In the 2020 Energy Outlook report the energy giant published this week, it said that the world may have reached peak oil.
The covid-19 pandemic has done a serious number on the oil industry, with demand falling to historic lows amid lockdowns and prices falling into negative territory. In a report on Tuesday, the International Energy Agency warned that for the oil industry, the "path ahead is treacherous," reducing its forecast for global oil demand in 2020 by 200,000 barrels per day. And on Monday, OPEC lowered its predictions of demand in 2020 by 400,000 barrels per day.
In BP's new report, analysts said the market may never recover from this damage. The authors lay out three possible scenarios for the world's energy usage between now and 2050, which illustrate a rapid, moderate, and slow transition to renewables. The first two scenarios show demand for oil steeply falling over the next three decades. But even under the firm's most "optimistic" scenario for Big Oil where climate action doesn't accelerate, oil demand will plateau at 2019 levels before declining in 2035.
This is a vastly different picture from the one the firm sketched in its last outlook report just one year ago, which predicted oil consumption would continue to grow over the next decade, peaking sometime in the 2030s.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 22 2020, @02:15PM (2 children)
As a practical matter, 'irrespective or price' is just a theoretical idea.
Oil will never completely run out.
It will just get so expensive to find that fewer and fewer use it.
So as a practical matter, peak oil means when is is so hard to find that it is no longer in general use.
The situation BP is talking about, oil is cheap but still nobody wants it. A bogus use of 'peak oil' to grab attention.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Aegis on Tuesday September 22 2020, @02:39PM (1 child)
There are many way to make something too expensive to be worth using. Competition from cheaper energy sources, for example, can make the oil too cheap to extract. Or, demand could drop to the point where the oil is too cheap to extract.
"Peak Oil" doesn't need to follow your preconceived notions of oil valuation.
(Score: 1) by hemocyanin on Tuesday September 22 2020, @05:26PM
The term has a specific meaning and it has nothing to do with renewables -- it references the maximum extraction rate. It also doesn't mean the end of oil extraction -- just the peak of extraction. For practical reasons (people go for the easy and cheap extraction first), extraction after peak is progressively more costly. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_oil [wikipedia.org]