After one of the most dramatic stretches in its history, the oil industry is slowly recovering. March and April saw the toxic combination of depressed demand, excessive supply, limited storage capacity, and intense financial speculation that turned prices on one index negative. Although concerns about a second wave of coronavirus infections remain high, demand is now back on the rise, and supply is in check. But that doesn’t mean that the industry is out of the woods. For now, though, the greatest source of uncertainty for oil producers is structural in nature, not cyclical. In fact, there is an increasing sense that peak oil—the moment when oil production reaches its point of maximum before starting a structural decline—has finally arrived. Since the 1950s, there has been plenty of speculation about an imminent shortage of crude oil. Such speculation has proved consistently wrong, as all predictions tended to underestimate both […]