That time when the maximum rate of petroleum production has been reached and the quantities can thus only decline after this period. There is a conflict between those who claim that that there is a large endowment of resources left in the world and that there is nothing to worry about and those that say that we have already hit peak oil, and there’s little we can do. Since 1980, discoveries have not replaced annual global crude oil production and discoveries are getting smaller and located in more difficult environments, such as the deepwater Gulf of Mexico. US oil production peaked in 1970. North Sea production peaked in 2000. Mexico peaked in 2004. Within the next few years, conventional non-OPEC production will reach a plateau. In fact, it is said that 60% of the world’s oil production is from countries that have already peaked. Total believes for instance that the world will never be able to produce more than 89m barrels a day of oil, due to high costs in areas such as Canada and political restrictions in countries like Iran and Iraq. In November 2009, an anonymous IEA source told the UK’s Guardian newspaper that the peak production figure of 105 million barrels per day of oil was much higher than can be justified and that even a lower figure of 90-95 million bpd would be unlikely

There is a common confusion between peak oil and the extraction of oil reserves: even though there are still vast reservoirs of oil in the world, which can seemingly supply the world’s needs for many dozens of years, the issue is that if one has reached peak oil – which occurs when over a half of the reservoirs have been used, as a result of which the growing gap between higher consumption and lower production, leads to higher prices