The end of the oil Gambit: Economic construction and Africa

In November 2009, the UK newspaper the Guardian ran a series of articles on 'Peak Oil' highlighting, among other points, claims that the International Energy Agency (IEA) had been downplaying the extent of the decline in world oil reserves and hence future production capacity. These claims were denied by the IEA, but a commentary by the doyen of Peak Oil theory, Colin Campbell, provided his own estimate indicating that oil production of all types, including oil from shale and tar sands, peaked in 2008. In his view, conventional crude oil production peaked in 2005, a view which broadly corresponds to that of Matthew Simmons, another leading figure in the Peak Oil debate, who unfortunately died recently.