A Realistic View of Our Oil Future

James Hamilton:

Right now there is considerable excitement about the potential for new horizontal fracturing methods to free oil from shale and other tight formations that traditionally had been inaccessible. This technological innovation is producing impressive production gains in places such as North Dakota and Texas; however, despite these gains, U.S. crude oil production in 2011 was still less than 60 percent of what it was in 1970. And a key unknown is how quickly production is likely to decline after the initial surge. The North Dakota Department of Mineral Resources estimates that production from a given fracking well will decline 80 percent within two years of initial production.
But despite the fact that U.S. oil production today is far below its level of 40 years ago, world oil production increased 33 percent between 1973 and 2010. Here again the story is one of development of new areas. These include the North Sea and Mexico, which went from 1 percent of world production in 1973 to 13 percent in 1999; however, the North Sea is now only producing at about half of its 1999 level, and Mexico is down 25 percent from its peak in 2004.
Other regions, such as central Asia, Africa, and Brazil continue to increase, and the government of Iraq is optimistic that quite substantial production gains can still be achieved there. These helped offset the North Sea and Mexican declines so that world production in 2010 was about at the same level as in 2005, and started to increase again in 2011 and 2012.
My view is that with these new fields and new technology, we’ll see further increases in U.S. and world production of oil for the next several years. But, unlike many other economists, I do not expect that to continue for much beyond the next decade. We like to think that the reason we enjoy our high standard of living is because we have been so clever at figuring out how to use the world’s available resources. But we should not dismiss the possibility that there may also have been a nontrivial contribution of simply having been quite lucky to have found an incredibly valuable raw material that was relatively easy to obtain for about a century and a half.

10 years isn't a hell of a long time.  The time to start adjusting to such a future is now.  Well actually, more like forty years ago.  But now is better than 10 years from now.