This Association have also highlighted that the total amount of energy available to the world from both oil and gas is projected to fall off sharply after 2015. Indeed, supplies of oil may have peaked already.

The oil peak is the reason why all energy prices are so high at present, although the media blames a set of little local difficulties such as hurricanes in the Gulf and unrest in Nigeria and Iraq rather than the fundamental cause. Unless the world economy collapses, thus cutting energy demand, we can expect that, every year, they will rise higher still. And this rise will be in real terms. In other words, we can expect to have to work for more and more minutes to earn enough money to buy a kWh of electricity or a litre of petrol or home heating fuel.

Humanity has used up roughly half of all the easily-extractable oil on the planet, mostly in the past 50 years. The clearest evidence for this is that the giant oil companies are failing to find enough new oil fields to keep up with demand. Indeed, their exploration results are so bad that, despite the high prices, it doesn't even pay them to look for oil any longer. According to report issued this autumn by Wood Mackenzie, a firm of energy consultants, the commercial value of oil and gas discovered over the past three years by the 10 largest listed energy groups is running well below the amount they have spent on exploration.
Warnings that the oil peak would be reached about now have been around since 1970 when Esso forecast it for around the year 2000, a date delayed by a few years thanks to the slower growth in demand following the oil shocks of 1973-1979. Other warnings came from the UK's Department of Energy in 1976, the Global 2000 Report to the President (1980), the World Bank, Global Energy Prospects (1981), and from numerous independent studies such as that by M. King Hubbert in 1977.

Although international competition for the dwindling supplies will ensure that high oil prices will be a permanent feature of life from now on, Ireland - in common with every other country - ignored the warnings and did nothing to prepare itself. Instead, it turned itself into the 7th most oil-dependent economy in the world, and the third most dependent in the EU after Portugal and Greece. Oil makes up 60% of primary energy consumption in Ireland, compared to an EU average of just 43%. Indeed, Ireland is even more dependent on oil for its energy than the United States: the latter is ranked 30th in the world in terms of oil-dependency, with oil providing 40% of it total energy requirements.

It wasn't always this way. Up until the mid-1990s, Irish oil consumption per capita was below the EU average. However as the chart below shows, we put a Celtic Tiger in our tank during the economic boom, with the result that Irish oil consumption per capita doubled between 1989 and 2001, whilst that of the EU and the world as a whole remained unchanged (see chart - bottom left).

It is worth noting that EU oil consumption in the chart is now lower than it was during the 1973 oil crisis, whilst ours is considerably higher. In other words, despite the warnings, successive Irish governments have allowed our energy economy to head off in entirely the wrong direction over the past thirty years.
Our current standard of living requires that we import some 9 million tonnes of oil every year, an amount which is still growing. In view of the government's plans for the continued expansion of the road network and the second runway at Dublin Airport, it obviously believes that, greenhouse gas emissions restrictions and the oil peak not withstanding, the import tonnage will climb much higher still. There's little evidence of joined-up thinking here.

We did not have to take the road we did. On a per capita basis, Ireland has the best renewable energy resources of any EU state. ESB International figures show that, theoretically, wind energy alone could provide 15 times more electricity than we are currently using. On top of that, we have excellent biomass, wave and tidal resources. Surprisingly, even our solar prospects are good.

Yet we have done the least of any EU state to develop our renewable energy potential. At the end of 2002, only Finland had less wind energy capacity installed - it has put its efforts into biomass energy instead - and in 2002 alone, Spain, with very much poorer wind conditions than Ireland, installed 1,493MW of wind capacity, eleven times the total amount that Ireland had installed by then and over a hundred times more than we installed that year. There is some hope that this will change as the Irish government is due to announce new renewable energy policies based on a consultation process it carried out earlier this year.