Are we approaching Peak Oil Demand? Not if the oil industry can help it
Lloyd Alter: January 31, 2018

Peak oil used to be about running out of supply; now some think that we will run out of demand. The oil companies will ensure that we never run out of demand.

Remember Peak Oil? It was all over TreeHugger, the idea that the easy oil was going to start running out and it would get more and more expensive and difficult to find.

We wrote post after post about Hubbert's Peak and how we were all gonna die, that we are "in the confusion stage now, followed by chaos and collapse and basically the End of the world as we know it as we slide down the slope from the Peak."

Then along came hydraulic fracturing (fracking), tight oil, deepwater drilling, Trump, Zinke and Pruitt, and the oil and gas are flowing freely and people are piling into pickups. Peak oilman King Hubbert became "a punchline rather than a visionary." And now, over at the NRDC, Jeff Turrentine asks Could Peak Oil Demand Be Just a Dozen Years Away? But he isn't talking about oil supply, he is talking demand, suggesting that electric cars are going to cause a different kind of peak.

In this very different type of forecast, oil production doesn’t necessarily begin to decline at a particular point. But our need for it does. And it’s not just a theory: Experts on all sides of the issue say that it’s really coming. At some point over the next 25 years, a number of cultural, political, and technological factors will combine to slake our global thirst for this once most essential of fossil fuels. After decades spent planning for scarcity, oil companies are now busily preparing for something that they never saw coming: their own marginalization.