[K-Dog]

ENERGYLIVENEWS.COM • 2026-02-12

We’re three years from peak oil

Economics thinktank predicts world oil demand will peak in 2028 and then slide down by a quater mid century.

Or Cornucopian models play games with limits.

Global gasoline demand is projected to fall by around two thirds by 2060, as electric vehicles spread and engines become markedly more efficient.

No, engines cannot become markedly more efficient. The laws of thermodynamics are not a suggestion. They are a locked door. The internal combustion engine long ago picked that lock, slipped through, and found itself in a small room with low ceilings.

What efficiency remains to be captured is not treasure. It is a few spare coins rattling in a car's glove box. The gap between where we are now and the theoretical limit is narrow. Guarded by friction, heat loss, and the stubborn insistence of physics that every joule of energy wants to become waste heat before it can become useful motion.

To promise marked gains by 2060 is not forecasting. It is hallucinating from too much CO₂ in the air. It is what people say when they need to believe that bad luck will not come their way.

That glaring misconception screams. And where there is smoke, there is fire. In this article, there is fire, and much hot air, along with an endless supply of cheap power and electrics.

Some articles are not written to inform. They are written to emotional specifications. Custom tailored for an audience that craves stability and fears disruption, and perhaps has good money to invest. An investor wants a future that will be subtle, nuanced, and kind. Reality be damned. The prose must glide. The curves must be smoothly taken. Declines become rebalancings. Collapse becomes a transition.

This article is built for the investor audience that wants to remain comfortable. It offers a world of controlled change. Where the peak is a gentle hill rather than a cliff's edge. Where the dismantling of the fossil fuel economy looks like a planned renovation, instead of the demolition of a rotten structure.  At worst the world of the long yawn.

But controlled change is not what the future is shaping up. The change approaching is an uncontrolled train wreck where the cars just keep smashing up, car after car.  One after another in a derailment that does not end. Cars pile on cars as twisted metal stacks on top of twisted metal.

That is the shape of things to come. No curve in the road. No adjustments. Instead, stage by stage, collapse compounds in inexorable intensity as time ticks on.

[TDoS]

Oxford Economics does good work. Any economic forecasts can be questioned obviously, the predictive power of a social science is always questionable. But in my experience with their people they are just doing their best from the perspective they've got. Never seen them so much as hint that they give a concern about the comfortability of their customers, paying or otherwise.