(AP Photo/Rich Pedroncelli, file)

According to some industry analysts, “peak oil” could actually be just around the corner. Not peak oil as it has been predicts for decades – a steadily increasing demand and a dwindling supply – but just the opposite. Royal Dutch Shell now believes that abundant supplies will outpace demand.

Royal Dutch Shell Plc, the world’s second-biggest energy company by market value, thinks demand for oil could peak in as little as five years, a rare statement in an industry that commonly forecasts decades of growth,” Bloomberg reports. “Shell’s view puts it at odds with some of its biggest competitors. Exxon Mobil Corp., the largest publicly traded oil company, said in its annual outlook that ‘global demand for oil and other liquids is projected to rise by about 20 percent from 2014 to 2040.’ Saudi Arabia, the biggest producer, with enough reserves to last it 70 years, has said demand will continue to grow, boosted by consumption in emerging markets.”

But Shell is looking at some disruptive factors, including renewable energy sources and electric cars and trains. And the company could be right.

What’s clear is that the other peak oil – diminishing supplies and increasing demand – hasn’t happened.

Writing for Realclearpolitics.com last month, Bill Murray and Carl Cannon reported an interesting fact: It’s 2016, and peak oil hasn’t peaked.

“In 1957, Tulsa celebrated Oklahoma’s golden anniversary of statehood by placing in a concrete vault under the county courthouse a host of mid-20th century artifacts, including a 16mm movie, a six-pack of Schlitz better, and a woman’s purse with bobby pins, lipstick, and a pack of cigarettes that retailed for 50 cents a pack,” they wrote. “It was all to be unearthed in another 50 years, so the organizers included a commodity they figured might not be around in 2007: five quarts of motor oil and 10 gallons of gasoline.”

They based that selection on peak oil theory – a nearly religious tenet of the environmental movement.

“It became an underlying basis for everything from Jimmy Carter’s admonition to turn down the nation’s thermostats, the enactment of 55-mile-per-hour speed limits, and federal mandates on gasoline standards for cars and trucks,” Murray and Cannon wrote. “Today, the question is how policymakers should react when the conventional wisdom is proven so spectacularly wrong, as is the case here.”

How wrong were they?

“The theory itself was promulgated and then popularized by M. King Hubbert, a Shell Oil Co. geologist who predicted in a 1956 scientific paper that U.S. oil production would peak in the early 1970s at 10 million barrels a day – and then begin a long inexorable decline,” they write. “But an unexpected development occurred in the 21st century, a century that the naysayers had said would be one with scarce crude oil resources: The supply instead exploded.”

We now produce 97 million barrels of oil per day.

The Obama administration is a true believer however. In a speech in 2011, President Obama declared, “we can’t just drill our way to lower gas prices.”

Wel, of course we can. And we are.