Colin Campbell (1931-2022)
Colin Campbell, the petroleum geologist who coined the term “peak oil,” has died. He was a co-founder of the Association for the Study of Peak Oil (ASPO) in 2000 and the author of many articles and books on petroleum geology and oil depletion.
Colin grew up in Cornwall in the southwest of Britain, his father a visionary architect who dreamed of creating a model village. Campbell earned his PhD in 1957, based on field work in Borneo. Shell hired him as an exploration geologist, but he soon moved to Texaco and began studying rocks in South America. In 1966, tasked with writing up a detailed review of Colombia’s petroleum geology, including past production and future prospects, Campbell had his first insights into resource limits.
These insights gradually coalesced into the landmark article, co-authored with Jean Laherrère, “The End of Cheap Oil,” published in the March, 1998 issue of Scientific American. The article was hugely influential. While the science of oil depletion had been explored by M. King Hubbert in the 1950s, the Campbell-Laherrère piece sparked new and widespread interest in the otherwise largely ignored fact that fossil fuels are finite resources that humanity is depleting over a remarkably a short time frame. Campbell and Laherrère were, in effect, saying to the world, “Hey, the stuff that makes our economy go will be harder to get in just a few years. What’s our plan?” So far, the world has had no good reply.
Campbell’s own plan was an “oil depletion protocol”—effectively, a global petroleum rationing system. According to its terms, the world’s oil-producing nations would agree to scale back annual extraction rates by their rates of depletion, thereby preserving the resource for future generations.
I owe Colin an immense personal debt. My books The Party’s Over (2003) and The Oil Depletion Protocol (2006) were based directly on his work, and he generously offered comments, corrections, and suggestions as these books were being written and edited.
Campbell expected a global peak in oil production to occur around 2007. Instead, while conventional oil extraction rates did stop growing then, fracking brought one last spurt of supply growth from unconventional “light, tight oil.” As of 2022, production growth from unconventional resources is straining to overcome accelerating declines in conventional crude output.
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Beyond being an exceptional scientist and talented communicator, Colin was a delightful human being. He had a kind disposition and a sparkling sense of humor. He was an entertaining raconteur about his former days in the oil industry, when he spent months at a time prospecting with a burro in South America. My wife Janet and I both fondly recall a visit with Colin and Bobbins Campbell at their home in Ballydehob, Ireland. When driving us briskly down dangerously narrow, twisty roads at the west end of County Cork, Colin smilingly reassured us, “Don’t worry, I’m a geologist.”
Colin enjoyed a daily pint of Murphy’s Irish Stout, and explained peak oil to the uninitiated thusly: “It’s quite a simple theory and one that any beer drinker understands. The glass starts full and ends empty and the faster you drink it the quicker it’s gone.”
Campbell had a philosophical outlook on humanity and its future. He didn’t expect a miraculous transition away from fossil fuels toward alternative energy sources. Instead, he believed we would endure a painful but instructive return to a lower-energy way of life.
Thank you, Colin, for your insights, your good humor, and your wisdom.
Photo: Colin Campbell 2006 San Rossore Italy. By Trotalli via Wikimedia Commons https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Colin_Campbell_Geologo_Petrolifero.jpg
RIP Colin. The originator of modern peak oil if anyone ever deserved the title.
He didn’t expect a miraculous transition away from fossil fuels toward alternative energy sources. Instead, he believed we would endure a painful but instructive return to a lower-energy way of life.
He was right. Most people alive today will live to see the pain start to rapidly increase, even in rich countries. Some people under 40 years old will live to see the lower-energy way of life. But most people will succumb to the pain and die prematurely.
I would also add a twist to the “glass of beer” analogy. The beer glass is really eight feet tall (about the maximum distance that anyone can suck up liquid with a straw) and the beer is extracted through a straw. In the beginning, when the glass is full, it is really easy to suck the beer out of the glass, but as the beer level in the glass declines it gets harder and harder to get it up through the straw and out of the glass. And then it becomes impossible and you’re out of beer.
Colin was indeed a wonderful man, and at the link below is another delightful story of his wide-ranging influence…
..wherein his work and generous spirit led David Fleming to a surprising meeting with – and confession from – none other than Fatih Birol, future Chief Economist & Executive Director of the International Energy Agency!
Fleming’s magisterial Dictionary for the Future and How to Survive It (now free at leanlogic.online) might well not exist without Campbell’s brilliance and avuncular support:
https://www.countercurrents.org/badal250510.htm
He would have been amazed the world still had not even gone close to running into actual peak oil, he would have been sure he would have seen it before he passed away, for most of his life.
Here’s an important, contextualizing companion piece to this article. https://www.resilience.org/stories/2018-10-29/our-bonus-decade/
I read his 1998 Scientific American article at the time with great interest. So did, apparently, people in high positions of power in the US government (and presumably governments in many places).
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The poor countries will bear most of the burden [of high oil prices]. But the United States will be in serious difficulties. There is, I fear, a strong danger of some ill-considered military intervention to try to secure oil.
— Colin Campbell, petrogeologist, Association for the Study of Peak Oil, December 2000
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geologist Colin Campbell on peak of oil production (2000)
Peak oil is a turning point for Mankind. The economic prosperity of the 20th Century was driven by cheap, oil-based energy. Everyone had the equivalent of several unpaid and unfed slaves to do his work for him, but now these slaves are getting old and won’t work much longer. We have an urgent need to find how to live without them.
It is stressed that we are not facing a re-run of the Oil Shocks of the 1970s. They were like the tremors before an earthquake, although serious enough, tipping the World into recession. Now, we face the earthquake itself. This shock is very different. It is driven by resource constraints, not politics – although of course politics do enter into it. It is not a temporary interruption but the onset of a permanent new condition.
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“Once you realize that this cheap, abundant, easy oil isn’t there, that tells you that virtually every company quoted on the stock market is now overvalued.”
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http://www.aspo-ireland.org/contentFiles/newsletterPDFs/newsletter95_200811.pdf
“future historians will probably look back and see this as one of the great turning points for mankind. In short, debt has been premised on eternal economic growth based on flat-earth economic principles, without recognising that the growth depends on cheap energy that will no longer be available after the peak of oil production as imposed by Nature.”
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as we move beyond the age of oil and beyond the economy that is driven by the age of oil, we enter an entirely new world – there really are frankly no experts anywhere who can come forward and say exactly what we do in this situation – it is entirely new to everybody’s experience – there are no investors who can say this is a good investment in this situation, there are no politicians who can say this is how we should behave in this situation, even in a humble business way there is no business that can plan its future because every single aspect of its future is going to change and so we are left with a sort of vacuum – Colin Campbell, founder of the Association for the Study of Peak Oil http://www.peakoil.net quoted in “Peak Oil: Imposed by Nature”