From May to September 2009, PowerSwitch conducted the 'Global Peak Oil Survey 2009'.  The initial results are now available to view.

Click here to read the Global Peak Oil Survey 2009 results here

The world is heading for a catastrophic energy crunch that could cripple a global economic recovery because most of the major oil fields in the world have passed their peak production, a leading energy economist has warned.

Higher oil prices brought on by a rapid increase in demand and a stagnation, or even decline, in supply could blow any recovery off course, said Dr Fatih Birol, the chief economist at the respected International Energy Agency (IEA) in Paris, which is charged with the task of assessing future energy supplies by OECD countries.

One commentator this week advising a longer term view on oil use was European Energy Commissioner Andris Piebalgs. In a piece for his blog he wrote that “It is difficult to forecast when the next oil crisis is going to come. As Nobel Prize Niels Bohr once put it “prediction is very difficult, particularly about the future”. But one thing is certain, one day we are going to run out of oil, and to prepare for that day we may be running out of time.” It appears that Mr Piebalgs view of the situation has altered somewhat since 2006 when he referred to peak oil as “no more than a theory”.

Original Article

It has been a week of contradictions. On the one hand the oil price went
through the $60/barrel barrier for the first time in 2009 spurred on by lower
than anticipated US gasoline stocks. On the other the latest IEA forecast was
released estimating that 2009 will see the biggest fall in oil demand for 28
years [3]. This announcement, along with news from OPEC that the cartel’s
compliance [4] to production quotas was down in April from 82% to 77%, drove
prices back down on Wednesday.