What would happen if peak oil were true and we had gas lines and there was no rationing plan in place—again—what would happen and what chaos would ensue?

As Matt Simmons suggests everyone would likely just top off their tanks. Seems reasonable. You never know when you will have another chance to fill up or how long the lines will be. It was noted that during the gas lines of the 1970’s the average purchase was less than 8  gallons.



So everyone fills up. Not just passenger cars but all motorized vehicles. This includes fleet transportation (trucking), boats, and the gas stations themselves.  What would be the problem you ask?

Unfortunately, the problem would be that there would be three months of no gasoline availability!  It would take that long to fill up the gasoline infrastructure including tanks and pipelines.  We would be living in interesting times.  Grocery shelves would be empty when the transportation fleet was empty— our highways would be empty and most likely we would be living like our great-grandparents.

Why would this happen you ask? Refer to Part 2 of this series for a more complete answer but for our purposes you just need to know that if you suck too much out of the system, and empty it, it takes that long to fill back up again—no matter how hard you try.

Other Peak Oil Issues

What are proven reserves of oil?—and how accurate are they?

99% of proven reserves of oil have never had an audit.  In the Middle East there was a race in the 1980’s when they were trying to set quota. The higher the proven reserves the higher your quota. Overnight Kuwait’s reserves went from 30 billion to 90 billion barrels of oil, the UAE reserves did the same, Iraq the same, Venezuela the same number, finally Saudi Arabia boosted their reserves in 1980 from 110 billion to 160 billion increased and then increased it again to 260 billion barrels of proven reserves.

These numbers have stayed static since that time frame despite continued production from these fields.  What is interesting is that each of these coutries claims that they do enough drilling each year and discover enough new proven reserves to maintain these numbers—there are no audits.

You don’t think that an audit of proven reserves is important?  Remember when that whistleblower from Shell oil sent a big document kit to the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal and their reserves subsequently dropped from 21 billion to 13 billion in less than one year? Once the auditors had a chance to analyze the proper data the reserves dropped 4 times.

It was called the Shell oil proven reserves scandal.

Matt Simmons has analyzed the data available from the Middle East fields and suspects that they have overstated reserves by one third. Proven reserves have been overstated by both national oil companies and Western oil companies. The former for political and quota purposes and the latter in order to lower their cost per barrel for ROI purposes. In the case of the Western Oil companies you can’t blame them because they know that in most cases it will be 80 years until they are proven wrong.  They will be long dead by then.

The only reliable statistics we have in the world are in an North Sea and Cantrell.  By the way—both are in steep decline. Saudi Arabia says they have 11.5 million barrels per day of productive capacity than why did they drop their production from 9.6 million barrels per day to 8.6 million barrels per day?  They say they did it to support the price— but who knows?

Why don’t people want better data?  Why don’t we have production data from the 200 biggest fields in the world?  Since we don’t we have essentially built all our expectations on quicksand.

The five major oil companies spend about $150 billion per year on exploration and production.  They must know more than they are telling us.  I doubt they are stupid.  Interesting to note that these five oil companies that have spent all this money on exploration and production have not increase their production.  In fact most have declined.

Does it not make sense that perhaps there are no more big fields to be found?

As Matt suggests did oil peak in 2005?

See Part 2: Oil is the Glue That Holds Society Together—Chaos and Peak Oil

See Part 4: Peak Oil and the 3000 Mile Ceasar Salad