World oil production is about to reach a peak and go into its final decline. For years, a handful of petroleum geologists, including me, have been predicting peak oil before 2007, but in an era of cheap oil, few people listened. Lately, several major oil companies seem to have got the message. One of Chevron"s ads says the world is currently burning 2 bbl. of oil for every barrel of new oil discovered. Exxon Mobil says 1987 was the last year that we found more oil worldwide than we burned. Shell reports that it will expand its Canadian oil-sands operations but elsewhere will focus on finding natural gas and not oil. It sounds as though Shell is kissing the oil business goodbye. M. King Hubbert, a geophysicist, correctly predicted in 1956 that oil production in the U.S. would peak in the early 1970s—the moment now known as "Hubbert"s Peak", I believe world oil production is about to reach a similar peak. Finding oil is like fishing in a pond. After several months, you notice that you are not catching as many fish. You could buy an expensive fly rod-new technology. Or you could decide that you have al ready caught most of the fish in the pond. Although increased oil prices (which ought to spur investment in oil production) and new technology help, they can"t work magic. Recent discoveries are modest at best. The oil sands in Canada and Venezuela are extensive, hut the Canadian operations to convert the deposits into transportable oil consume, large amounts of natural gas, which is in short supply. And technology cannot eliminate the difficulty Hubbert identified: the rate of producing oil depends on the fraction of oil that has not yet been produced. In other words, the fewer the fish in the pond, the harder it is to catch one. Peak production occurs at the halfway point. Based on the available data about new oil fields, there are 2,013 billion bbl. of total producible oil. Adding up the oil produced from the birth of the industry until today, we will reach the dreaded 1,006.5 billion bbl. halfway mark late this year. For two years, I"ve been predicting that world oil production would reach its peak on Thanksgiving Day 2005. Today, with high oil prices pushing virtually all oil producers to pull up every barrel they can sweat out of the ground, I think it might happen even earlier.
A．People stop searching for oil.B．People decrease the production of oil.C．People use less oil than they used to.D．The oil exploitation is limited.
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