Science and industry. Oil: never cry wolf--why the petroleum age is far from over.

Geological Survey (USGS)— among many others—deliv-ered a verdict of gloom in 1919: The country would run out of oil within 9 years! (1) Facing mounting hysteria, President Coolidge set up the Federal Oil Conservation Board in 1924, to draft legislation to preserve national resources. After the conversion of Great Britain's naval fleet from coal to oil in 1914, the UK also feared that it would be vulnerable to oil shortages and moved to secure its grip on the Persian Gulf. These cycles of hysteria followed by new bonan-zas have continued to the present. Thus, it is not surprising that a new wave of " oil doomsters " predicting imminent petroleum scarcity has gained momentum (2–4). The worst effect of this recurring oil panic is that it has driven Western political circles toward oil imperialism and attempts to assert direct or indirect control over oil-producing regions. Yet the world is not running out of oil, and catastrophic views fail to take into account the complex reality that will allow reliance on abundant supplies for years to come. The current model of oil doomsters is derived from K. M. Hubbert (5). The model is conceptually simple, but based on several assumptions. The first is that the geological structure of our planet is well known and thoroughly explored, so that discovery of unknown oil fields is highly improbable. Second, to resolve problems connected with erratic distribution and production from thousands of oil fields and uncertainty of future discoveries, production is assumed to follow the " Central Limit Theorem " from statistics. This theorem states that the sum of a large number of erratic variables tends to follow a normal distribution and assumes a bell-shaped curve (see figure above). Starting from zero, production grows over time until it peaks when half of the re-coverable resources have been extracted (" midpoint depletion "). Then, production irreversibly declines at the same rate at which it grew. The area under the curve shows the cumulative production of an oil field or the " ultimate recoverable resources " (URR) it holds and their lifespan. Accordingly, to forecast Earth's URR, one needs to process worldwide production and discovery trends and geological data. In 1956, Hubbert accurately predicted the peak oil production point of the U.S. lower 48 states. The Hubbert curves do not delineate the complex and dynamic nature of oil production and reserves in the world, because they …