When will oil, natural gas, and coal peak?

In this paper, a predictive model based on a variant of the multi-cyclic Hubbert approach is applied to forecast future trend in world fossil fuel production. Starting from historical data on oil (crude and NGL), natural gas, and coal production, and taking into consideration three possible scenarios for the global Ultimate (i.e. cumulative production plus remaining reserves plus undiscovered resources), this approach allowed us to determine when these important energy sources should peak and start to decline. In particular, considering the most likely scenarios, our estimated peak values were: 30 Gb/year in 2015 for oil, 132 Tcf/year in 2035 for natural gas, and 4.5 Gtoe/year in 2052 for coal. A plateau is likely to occur in the case of natural gas, if the global Ultimate is high. A comparison of the Multi-Hubbert Variant (MHV) approach used in this paper with both the Single-cycle Hubbert (SH) and the original Multi-cyclic Hubbert (MH) approach has also been done. (C) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.