Peak Oil

 Excerpts from a recent Radio National interview
Flow Rate
the fact is that we cannot pull out as much from an oil field that many people think is possible to do. I used to compare it with money; if you have $1 million in your bank account and you only can use $60,000 each year, are you a millionaire then or not? Because that is the fact, you can only pull out something like 6% of the oil per year, and that is a flow rate problem, as we discussed.

Production rates
They say that up until 2030 we should find something like 114 billion barrels of new oil in new oil fields. These oil fields should give a rate of production that is 19 million barrels per day. In comparison with the North Sea, that was the latest region we found, they had a maximum of six million barrels per day at the peak in the production rate. So what they're saying in principle is that we should find three new regions of the size of the North Sea now and put it into production immediately. And we see that there is a decline in the discovery rate instead of an increase, so the numbers don't come together.

Peak Oil occcured in 2008: Macquarie Bank here in Australia just a year or so ago, one of their analysts said they couldn't see oil production going up past 2008 or 2009

The high oil price we had in 2008 was, according to my opinion, the thing that triggered the downscale of the economy....

Because it all started in the United States, you know. There you don't have any taxes on gasoline and so on, so suddenly people get a twice as expensive oil bill to come into work and so on, and they couldn't afford to pay for their houses, and they have a system where you just can leave the house and say, okay, I'm just leaving, and the bank has to take care of it, and the bank had made some kind of stupid systems that everything was just falling apart, you know. But the trigger was the oil price.
Jonica Newby: You actually believe hitting peak oil triggered off the global financial crisis?
Kjell Aleklett: Yes, and the exact month for peak oil was in July 2008.