Time will tell if Kenneth Deffeyes is right in his hypothesis that global oil production peaked in December of 2005. Deffeyes:

February 11, 2006

In the January 2004 Current Events on this web site, I predicted that world oil production would peak on Thanksgiving Day, November 24, 2005. In hindsight, that prediction was in error by three weeks. An update using the 2005 data shows that we passed the peak on December 16, 2005.

Me, just to be safe, I’m taking my grand auto-tour of the continent this summer. Headlines today show oil prices spiking again due to Nigerian revolutionaries declaration of total war on the oil export business. I still don’t completely understand the more alarmist of the peakists’ certainty that the ‘non-negotiable’ way of life is going to evaporate: can’t coal be substituted for oil? Doesn’t high-pressure chemistry make it possible to synthesize what we need — fuel, fertilizer, plastics — from coal? Didn’t Germany and South Africa do just that when faced with a cut-off of their oil supplies, during WWII and the apartheid eras, respectively? Somebody, please, set me straight on this.

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