Oil experts draw fire for warning supply could peak by 2010

UPPSALA, Sweden -- Global supplies of crude oil will peak as early as 2010 and then start to decline, ushering in an era of soaring energy prices and economic upheaval -- or so said an international group of petroleum specialists meeting Friday.

They hope to persuade oil-dependent countries like the United States to stop what they view as squandering the planet's finite bounty of fossil fuels.

Americans, as the biggest consumers of energy, could suffer a particularly harsh impact on their lifestyle, warned participants in the two-day conference on oil depletion that began Thursday at Uppsala University in Uppsala, Sweden.

"There is no factual data to support the general sense that the world will be awash in cheap oil forever," said Matthew Simmons, an investment banker who helped advise President Bush's campaign on energy policy. "We desperately need to find a new form of energy."

Colin Campbell, a retired geologist who helped organize the conference, argued that governments are too caught up in short-term issues to focus on the long-term threat of depleted oil reserves. Oil companies prefer not to talk about it for fear of upsetting their investors, he said.

'Geologists just laugh'

Their warning defies the more commonly held view that global crude reserves will remain plentiful for decades. Critics say similar predictions of scarcity at the time of the 1973-74 Arab oil embargo didn't come true.

"There's a lot of phony baloney in there," said economist Michael Lynch of the U.S. business forecasting firm DRI-WEFA. "A lot of prominent geologists just laugh at this."

Roger Bentley, head of The Oil Depletion Analysis Center in London, insisted that the predictions made in the 1970s were basically correct. About 50 countries, including the United States, have already passed their point of peak oil output, he said.