Links to Updated Material
- United States oil production by week: (conventional and non-conventional) updates Wednesdays. Probably you’ll look and see peak production of oil teetering along around the mid to upper 13,000 thousand barrels per day throughout 2025. When it drops much below 13K, I’ll expect it’s not coming back. This is the most up to the date graph. Given the United States is currently the world’s number one producer, I suspect as it goes, so goes the Western world. And the rest of the world is no picnic either. Also the EIA, generally optimistic, is predicting a “slight” production turn down in 2026 and further in 2027. A turn down in production in 2026 and further in 2027 is suggestive of a peak in 2025.
- World oil production by month: (conventional and non-conventional) Updated monthly through May of 2025, but only goes back 5 years without a subscription. Back when I started watching this site in 2020, it showed a peak in November 2018 of 84.49 million barrels a day.
- World oil production by year: (conventional and non-conventional). This graph appears to be updated annually with a year delay, and looks more optimistic, showing a peak in 2024. I think it might differ from the October 2018 peak, by being an average for the year, rather than a monthly spike. It does however, go back many years and does not require a paid subscription. It’s also given in “terawatt hours of energy” rather than in barrels, so that might affect it also. Still this one lets you graph any country individually, and/or the world in total and it goes back to 1900 for free.
- EIA crude oil production: No graph but the top line is updated to Q3 2025, for world, the United States and other countries. It only shows 2024-25, with world production in the rage of 76-79 (and change) million barrels per day. I will monitor to see if it’s continually updated or replaced by a different PDF/url.\
Introduction
It seems to me that we are at or just past peak oil 3.0, and there won’t be a fourth, nor any “transition” to speak of that will compensate for what we are losing. You might wonder, what’s that mean? In 2010 the German military thought it meant this [free full text]. A highly recommended read. The paper is said to have not been meant to be made public, but sounds right to me, even if their timing was off. Or given that Germany can’t frack it’s own oil, the dates might coincide with their lived experience, that’s soon to be ours, given we are selling ours all off at market prices seemingly as fast as we can.
There are a few ways of breaking this down, but I expect in a few short years (probably less than 5) it will all be academic, and people will just wonder:
- “Wait, what?”
- “Why hadn’t I heard of this?”
- “Why weren’t we warned?”
- “Why were we all so stupid?”
- “How was this kept secret?”
Entire books have been written on this topic (most in the early 2000s, around what I’ll call peak oil 2.0) and of them I suggest Colin Campbell’s Oil Crisis. However, if you would prefer to watch a fantastic, if somewhat dated documentary about Colin Campbell and peak oil, old though it be, Colin’s Paradigm is very informative, and even interviews David Fleming, author of my favorite book Lean Logic. Colin is the horse’s mouth when it came to peak oil 2.0, which I’ll get to below.
A few definitions are worth knowing.
Peak oil: means peak production of oil. For any oil field, or collection of oil fields (the largest collection being all of them on earth). Typically, when an oil field is first found, you sink a well, get a lot of oil, sink more wells into it and get oil out ever faster. However, there is a point, usually around the half way depleted point, where no matter how many more wells you sink, or how hard you pump, you start getting less oil back. That peak in production, the turning point, is peak oil.
Conventional oil: means the regular black liquid oil that you think of and more or less just pump out of the ground. Generally, this is (or was) cheap, easy to get oil, however as the conventional oil wells become depleted, getting the last bits out become more expensive and difficult. If you read Colin’s book, or this paper he published in1998 when predicted peak oil within ten years, and hit the nail on the head, he clearly stated he was referring to the world peak in conventional oil, what I’m calling Peak Oil 2.0.
Non-conventional oil: (it’s worth knowing that conventional and non-conventional is a bit of a simplification and a sliding scale), but non-conventional oil is generally meant to mean things like:
- fracked oil (not pumped from a reservoir, but exploded from stone, then pumped with pressure)
- bitumen/tar sands (that is more mined than pumped)
- deep water, or polar oil (that is in fact conventional oil, but is so difficult to get that it’s generally lumped in with non-conventional
Peak Oil 1.0 (1970)
Peak oil 1.0 is what I’m calling the 1970 United States peak in conventional oil production. Peak U.S. conventional oil was as accurately predicted in 1956 by M. King Hubbert. The gist of Hubbert’s paper was that discovery of oil precedes production of oil (you have to find it before you can pump it) by 20-40 years. Such that if discoveries start to drop off, you can then predict production to later drop off some decades later so as to roughly match. While this seems elementary, I’m told that few believed him at the time, until he was proved right, and peak oil 1.0 triggered the oil crisis of the 1970s right on schedule. You can download and read Hubbert’s Original paper for free here. It’s a brilliant read, interesting to learn how he came up with it, and puts you way ahead of the game in talking with others, politicians and economists especially.
Anyway, this is nicely visible on a graph, that lets me embed it’s data, showing peak oil 1.0 exactly at 1970:
- See that rocket ship beginning in 2009? That’s when Farack (not exactly environmental) Obama was elected and the effects of fracking non-conventional shale oil, bringing about Peak oil 3.0, any second now, if not already, but I don’t want to get ahead of myself.
- That second lower hump in 1985 was Alaska’s North Slope coming on, then then declining, as all oil fields invariably do.
Peak oil 1.0 sent shock waves around the world, precipitated the 1973 oil crisis, and literally inspired Mad Max all the way over in Australia, as is aptly described by script writer James McCausland. James’ article is a short but very good read, and was written right about the time of peak oil 2.0.
Peak Oil 2.0 (2006)
Whereas peak oil 1.0 was peak production of U.S conventional oil, 2006 was peak production of worldwide conventional oil. Hubbert not only predicted the U.S. oil, but by using the same style of calculations, in his above linked paper, also predicted a peak in world oil production of conventional oil around the year 2000. He turns out to have been only off by a few years, though I recall reading it somewhere that he wouldn’t have been off at all if not for the 1970s slowdown in consumption caused by peak oil 1.0.
Hubbert died in 1989, and peak oil the concept was all but forgotten until Colin Campbell (geologist) and Jean H. Laherrère (petroleum engineer) published their 1998 six page paper The End of Cheap Oil [free and an important read]. This paper and Colin’s subsequent books (Oil Crisis being my favorite) kicked off what became known as the peak oil movement in the early 2000s.
Despite piles of books (many of which I bought used and cheap) written about peak oil 2.0, I completely missed hearing of it until 2020. I did notice that almost all if these books predicting all kinds of decline/collapse of civilization were 10-15 years old, and most of their predictions did not happen in the timelines often suggested, because non-conventional oil, while already known about, and described, was more of an afterthought.
You can get a view of timing of the hoopla by looking at trends.google for the term “peak oil” 2004-present and see the flurry of activity from 2004-2010 before dropping off into absolute obscurity today. So what happened?
It would be nice to think alternative energies like wind and solar happened, but it seems for the most part “non-conventional” oil happened. And this happened faster than expected, primarily by improved fracking technology of the shale oil deposits in the United States, making up for decades long declines of conventional oil in the U.S, and even stabilized world production. It would have been nice to preserve this oil, and use it as needed, but no, we pumped it as fast as we could, bought SUVs, sold, and are still selling the “surplus” on the open market. This lecture given by Dennis Meadows, of Limits to Growth fame, goes into detail and is very informative. Fracked shale oil production, while not fully unexpected, did produce more oil/faster than most expected, and has held out longer than expected, even by Meadows, but probably not much longer, and is itself just about peaking bringing us to peak oil 3.0. And speaking of Limits to Growth, if you look at their “standard run” on page 124, and put in your own dates with a ruler, they’re showing peak industrial capital right around 2010.
Peak Oil 3.0 (2024) “peak net energy”
Peak oil 3.0 is difficult to see clearly because as of 2025 (as I write this) we are right about at, or maybe already past it. It is obscured, as of late, by what’s counted as “oil.” What’s counted now counted by various reporting agencies is inconsistent, and not just conventional and non-conventional oil, but often includes things like ethanol from corn, natural gas liquids (e.g. ethane, propane, butane) and now liquified natural gas. Things that aren’t exactly oil. Also, while historically it seems you can predict peak oil with reasonable accuracy, within a few years at least, you’re never sure until you are looking back in hindsight at a graph and can say, “yup, that was the peak, just like they said.”
An additional confounder is energy returned on energy invested (EROI), meaning how many barrels of oil (or some other energy) do you have to put in, as a ratio over how much you get out. Energy in over energy out. As oil becomes harder to find and get, it takes more oil to get it.
A newer but closely related concept or EROI is “net energy” as described and calculated in this recent study Peak oil and the low-carbon energy transition: a net-energy perspectiv [free full text]. Both EROI and net energy are declining, meaning even if we are getting more oil out of the ground, it’s only by using more energy to get it. This is because all the easy to get oil was got first. The remaining oil that comes out, after subtracting the oil needed to get it, is less. And increasingly less than the publicized rate of extraction in the links I’ve given. In this study, they estimate that in 2015 , 15.5% of the energy extracted was needed to extract it, by 2024 (last year) it would be 25%, and by 2050 it is expected to rise to a full 50%, in what they aptly describe as “energy cannibalism.” They predicted peak net energy last year in 2024.
As of now, October 2025, not taking into account net energy, gross extraction of “oil” is as follows:
- United States oil production by week: (conventional and non-conventional) updates Wednesdays. Probably you’ll look and see peak production of oil teetering along around the mid 13,000 thousand barrels per day. When it drops much below, I’ll expect it’s not coming back. This is the most up to the date graph, and the United States is currently the world’s number one producer. I suspect as it goes, so goes the Western world.
- Gross world oil production by month: (conventional and non-conventional) Updated monthly with a delay of several months May (given in October) of 2025, but only goes back 5 years without a subscription. Back when I started watching this site in 2020, it showed a peak in November 2018 of 84.49 million barrels a day (glad I wrote it down).
- World oil production by year: (conventional and non-conventional). This graph appears to be updated annually with a year delay, and looks more optimistic, showing a peak in 2024. I think it might differ from the October 2018 peak, by being an average for the year, rather than a monthly spike. It does however, go back many years and does not require a paid subscription. It’s also given in “terawatt hours of energy” rather than in barrels, so that might affect it also.
- EIA crude oil production: No graph but the top line is updated to Q3 2025, for world, the United States and other countries. [I will monitor to see if it’s continually updated or replaced by a different PDF/url.]
The above four links are what I think are important to monitor going forward to confirm or deny the timing of peak oil 3.0, and are thus given as quick links at the top of the page.
The crucial shortage on deck in regards to energy for civilization in general, and Phoenix, Arizona in particular (where most of my homies live) seems to be the availability of diesel fuel, as Alice Friedemann describes in her book, When Trucks Stop Running. You can get the gist of it here in her talk about with Derrick Jensen, which goes into depth about how renewable energy can’t make up the slack, particularly for semi-trucks, that can’t be made to run efficiently off batteries. She mentions Phoenix right off the bat.
It’s a bit of a moral dilemma knowing what to do, given all the above, and the fact that nobody in politics seems to care. I’m imagining it’s good to have a heads-up before it’s obvious to the masses, so, don’t share this with anyone who isn’t cool.
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