Are We Entering the 'Twilight Era' of Petroleum?

"we are just about to enter the Twilight Era of Petroleum, a time of chronic energy shortages and economic stagnation as well as recurring crisis and conflict....The culture and lifestyles we associate with the heyday of the Petroleum Age—large, gas-guzzling cars and SUVs, low-density suburban sprawl, strip malls and mega-malls, cross-country driving vacations, and so on—will give way to more constrained patterns of living based on a tight gasoline diet. While Americans will still consume the lion's share of global petroleum stocks on a daily basis, we will have to compete far more vigorously with consumers from other countries, including China and India, for access to an ever-diminishing pool of supply.

"[...]Just how seriously American policymakers view these various energy-related developments is further revealed in another recent event: the first high-profile "war game" featuring an overseas oil crisis. Known as "Oil Shockwave...[the simulation] identified a set of conditions that provide a vivid preview of what we can expect during the Twilight Era of Petroleum:

- Global oil prices exceeding $150 per barrel

- Gasoline prices of $5.00 or more per gallon

- A spike in the consumer price index of more than 12 percent

- A protracted recession

- A decline of over 25 percent in the Standard & Poor's 500 stock index

- A crisis with China over Taiwan

- Increased friction with Saudi Arabia over U.S. policy toward Israel

"Whether we experience these precise conditions cannot be foreseen at this time, but it is incontestable that a slowdown in the global production of petroleum will produce increasingly severe developments of this sort and, in a far tenser, more desperate world, almost certainly threaten resource wars of all sorts; nor will this be a temporary situation from which we can hope to recover quickly. It will be a semi-permanent state of affairs."

Thanks to Michael Dudley