According to a September 2005 report by the Army Corp of Engineers entitled "Energy Trends and Implications for U.S. Army Installations, "world oil production is at or near its peak and current world demand exceeds supply."
The Army Corp of Engineers goes on to say:
"The supply of oil will remain fairly stable in the very near term, but oil prices will steadily increase as world production approaches its peak. The doubling of oil prices in the past couple of years is not an anomaly, but a picture of the future. Peak oil is at hand with low availability growth for the next 5 to 10 years. Once worldwide petroleum production peaks, geopolitics and market economics will result in even more significant price increases and security risks. To guess where this is all going to take us is would be too speculative. Oil wars are certainly not out of the question. Disruption of world oil markets may also affect world natural gas markets as much of the natural gas reserves are collocated with the oil reserves."
The document can be found via the Association for the Study of Peak Oil at:
http://www.peakoil.net/Articles2005/Westervelt_EnergyTrends__TN.pdf
What this says to me is that the idea of peak oil is gaining greater credibility and already part of the working assumption of the US Army.
And as I have been saying for the last couple years, the TDM community needs to jump on this and makes sure that TDM is one of the first strategies that federal decision-makers think of in terms of how this nation responds to mitigate the impact of peak oil. The question is what is the best way to promote TDM as one of the most cost effective ways of not only dealing with congestion, but also America's oil dependence. What are your thoughts?
CHRIS HAGELIN, CUTR
