Oil futures: A comparison of global supply forecasts

By S. Sorrell, Richard G. Miller, R. Bentley, Jamie Speirs. 2010

114 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper compares and evaluates fourteen contemporary forecasts of global supply of conventional oil and provides some observations on their relative plausibility. Despite the wide range of modelling approaches used and multiplicity of assumptions made, it is shown that forecasts can be usefully compared along two dimensions, namely: shape of future production profile and assumed or implied ultimately recoverable resource of conventional oil. Other differences between forecasts are either secondary or are components of these two parameters. The paper shows how large differences in the assumed size of the resource make relatively little difference to the timing of a global peak in conventional oil production. It also examines the impact of rates of discovery, reserves growth and depletion on the forecast date of peak and shows how forecasts that delay this peak until beyond 2030 rest on assumptions that are at best optimistic and at worst implausible.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Renewable Energy, Sustainability and the Environment

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/97ec3796299e902cb6f71e1c015418945e6c9933

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Economics and Econometrics

In Renewable Energy, Sustainability and the Environment

Citations in the corpus

On the Cusp of Global Collapse? Updated Comparison of The Limits to Growth with Historical Data (2012, background): “Sorrell et al. (2010b, 2010a) review many of these and find that independent research - ers generally expect peaking to occur within about a de cade, or to have occurred recently (e.g., Murray and King 2012); estimates of peaking made by oil industry representatives tend to be decades away.”
The Future of Oil: Geology Versus Technology (2012, background): “The most thorough research available on this topic is UK Energy Research Centre (2009), which is succinctly summarized in Sorrell et al. (2010).”
Energy requirements of consumption: Urban form, climatic and socio-economic factors, rebounds and their policy implications (2013, background): “Serious concerns have furthermore been raised about the global production of conventional oil peaking sometime between now and in the next 10–30 years (Aleklett et al., 2009; Sorrell et al., 2010a, 2010b; Hirsch, 2008).”
Depletion of fossil fuels and anthropogenic climate change—A review (2013, background): “In hindsight, empirical observations show that nearly 60 countries have already passed their maximum production levels of oil (Sorrell et al., 2010).”