It's the politics, stupid. The message that is coming loud and clear from the oil industry is not surprising but not very reassuring. The world may run out of love for oil before it runs out of oil.

It is the same message that Sheikh Yamani, the former Saudi oil minister, famously delivered when he said: “The stone age did not end for lack of stone and the oil age will end long before the world runs out of oil.”

In other words, political and economic upheavals will count for more in our ability to access and produce more hydrocarbons than anything in the geology of the earth. There is a finite supply of oil locked in the rock and we have found the easy stuff, but the analysis by Cambridge Energy Research Associates suggests that the output rate is not on a knife-edge to oblivion. The decline rate of a well is critical because every barrel we produce must be replaced even as we try to raise the overall output to meet demand from new consumers. In other words the world must run to stand still; if we are to meet the needs of more people, we must run ever faster. That is a tough call, but Cera's analysis suggests we are doing it. If the overall decline is 4.5 per cent, it makes the treadmill less exhausting than 8 per cent. It will nevertheless be a huge stretch to raise output to 100million barrels per day.

The caution expressed by Christophe de Margerie, Total's chief executive, when interviewed by The Times in 2006, that the world could never meet IEA projections of 120million barrels per day has been echoed across the oil industry.

To achieve such levels would require a global unity of purpose in regulation, taxation and an outbreak of peace never before seen. Instead, there is oil nationalism, expropriation and mounting anxiety about climate change.

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