Widow's Peak

According to a shocking headline in Der Spiegel the other day, the Energy Watch Group does not think that ‘Peak Oil’ - the legendary point where the global oil supply starts to diminish - is still ahead in 2020, where some have speculated before. They think we passed it already, back in 2006.
[My Translation] “...According to the Energy Watch Group, the worldwide maximum supply of oil was already reached in 2006 at 81 million barrels per day. Since then production has fallen back. By 2020 it will be only 58 million barrel. With this, the experts have revised down earlier prognoses massively...”
While the industry-funded International Energy Agency sees supply merrily going up and up, the Energy Watch experts expect no more increases from now on. That is not to say that oil will run out, but that there will be few significant new finds of oil and that demand will continue to outstrip a gradually falling supply.
“...Traders explain the sudden increase in oil prices as being in the framework of daily fluctuations - or they blame the activities of speculators. But doubts about this scenario are growing. ‘Hopes that the “Speculator Bubble” will burst are futile’, says Werner Zittel, one of the authors of the Energy-Watch-Group-Study. In his view higher oil-prices have a real-world explanation - the dwindling of resources...”

According to a picture graphic in another article in Der Spiegel on the same subject, if all the oil known to exist were added to all the oil believed to exist, it would come to just under two hundred and forty-five billion tonnes. This got me thinking. Although my arithmetic is not the best, I was tempted to do a quick shuffle through Internet sources for scientific measures and conversion tables. This leads me to believe that one barrel of crude oil would weigh about 142.80 kilos. A tonne of crude oil would then be about seven barrels. Let’s assume that the world uses about eighty million barrels of crude oil per day (sources vary on this). If so, then the world uses about eleven million, four hundred thousand tonnes of oil per day. Therefore the world has fifty-eight years and eight months of oil left, in total... including all the reserves not yet considered economic to recover. Therefore, the very last drop will be consumed early in 2067.