For fifty years "peak oil" meant the world running out of supply. Shale broke that thesis — and the debate inverted to peak demand: when do EVs, efficiency and policy start shrinking the market? Here's the history, the scorecard, and where the major forecasters now disagree.
Related: how much oil is left · the official price forecast · what prices did through past scares.
Originally, the idea (M. King Hubbert, 1956) that world oil PRODUCTION would peak and irreversibly decline as geology ran out — Hubbert correctly called the 1970 peak of conventional US output. The modern debate has inverted: supply keeps growing (shale, deepwater, oil sands), so the question is now when DEMAND peaks as EVs and efficiency spread.
Partly. Hubbert nailed the US conventional peak, and forecasters in the 2000s expected a global supply peak around 2010 — instead, $100 oil summoned fracking, and US output alone roughly doubled. The lesson: "peak oil" analyses consistently underestimated how price and technology convert uneconomic resources into producible reserves.
The IEA projects a plateau this decade; OPEC sees growth into the 2040s. The disagreement hinges on EV adoption (especially in China, where transport fuel may already be peaking) versus petrochemical and developing-Asia growth. Today demand is still near record levels — about 103 million barrels per day.
Not in any meaningful sense. Proven reserves (~1.7 trillion barrels) equal decades of use, the wider resource base is several times larger, and economics will retire oil before geology does: as demand declines, the cheapest barrels (Middle East) supply a shrinking market while high-cost sources exit. Oil's end looks like the Stone Age's — we didn't run out of stones.