"One of the best arguments for oil's increasing scarcity has been made by Ali Samsam Bakhtiari, Ph.D., a former director of the National Iranian Oil Co. who died in 2007. In one of the doctor's last research essays, he wrote of world's oil production: "After some 147 years of almost uninterrupted supply growth to a record output of some 81-82 million barrels per day in the summer of 2006, crude oil production has since entered its irreversible decline."
Samsam added, somewhat intuitively, the decrease "will eventually come to affect everything else under the sun." American oilman T. Boone Pickens also fully realizes the changes that will have to be made in our lives going forward. Pickens, who made his billions primarily from oil, is espousing a strategy that would have America deriving much of its energy needs from wind, with natural gas filling in the holes.
"The world has been looked at. There's still oil to be found, but not in the quantities we've seen in the past," Pickens said. "The big fields have all been found and the smaller fields, well, there's not enough of them to replenish the base ... If I'm right, we're already at the peak. The price will have to go up."
As Pickens mentioned, production in many of the world's megafields has already dropped ominously. Megafields are even more important than they sound: Half the world's oil comes from just .03% of its oil fields (the mega ones). When the megafields' production begins to ebb, it's likely we'll have entered an irreversible supply decline. It's a reality that's here. Consider this: Oil fields typically enter decline after 50 years of pumping. And the average age of the world's largest 14 fields? Forty-nine years."
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