Peak Oil 1.0 (1970)

1970 was was the United States peak in conventional oil production, which is what I’m calling peak oil 1.0. Peak U.S. conventional oil was as accurately predicted in the 1950s by L. King Hubbert. I’m told that few believed him, but he was proved right, and peak oil 1.0 triggered the oil crisis of the 1970s. You can download and read Hubbert’s Original paper for free here. It’s quite good and interesting to learn how he came up with it.

Peak oil 1.0 sent shock waves around the world precipitated 1973 oil crisis, and literally inspires 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 (2005-2006)

Whereas peak oil 1.0 was peak production of U.S conventional oil. 2005-2006 was peak production of worldwide conventional oil. Hubbart 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 slow down in consumption caused by peak oil 1.0.

Hubbart died in 1989, and peak oil the concept was all but forgotten by the general public and apparently politicians alike 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 now own) 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.

You can get a view of timing of the hoopla by looking at trends.google for the term “peak oil” 2004-present and see that there was a 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 primarily by improved fracking technology and 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. This was unexpected as both Hubbert and Campbell talked about shale oils, and this lecture given by Dennis Meadows of Limits to Growth fame goes into detail. 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 the us to peak oil 3.0.

Peak Oil 3.0

Peak oil 3.0 is difficult to see clearly because as of 2025 (as I write this) we are right about at, or maybe past it. It is in some ways obscured, as of late, by what’s counted as “oil.” What’s counted now by various reporting agencies is inconsistent but often includes things like ethanol from corn, bitumen (in tar sands) natural gas liquids (e.g. ethane, propane, butane) and now liquified natural gas. Things that aren’t exactly oil, and some things not even a little bit. 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 and can say, “yeah, more or less, that was the peak.”

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 many barrels of oil (or some other comparable unit of energy) you get out. As oil becomes harder to find and get, it takes more oil to get it. A newer but closely related concept “net energy” as described and calculated in the recent study Peak oil and the low-carbon energy transition: a net-energy perspective. Both EROI and net energy are declining, meaning we may be getting more oil out of the ground, but only for a while, and only by putting a lot more energy in 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 less. And increasingly less than the publicized rate of extraction. In the linked study, they estimate in 2015 that 15.5% of the energy extracted, is needed to extract it, and by 2050 this is expected to rise to 50%, in what they aptly describe as “energy cannibalism.” They predicted peak net energy last year in 2024 at which point they expect percent energy to extract will have increased to 25%.

As of now, October 2025, not taking into account net energy, gross extraction of “oil” is as follows:

• Gross American oil production by week: (conventional and non-conventional)
  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).
• Gross 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 “terrawatt hours of energy” rather than in barrels, so that might affect it also.
• EIA gross 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 are all the important links to monitor 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.