One year ago we were preparing the article ”Aviation fuel and future oil production scenarios”, (now published in Energy Policy) och i in November 2008 I was invited by IATA to Shanghai to a conference on the future of aviation fuel. In my presentation I discussed tourist aviation in the future and I mentioned that nations that invest heavily in expansion of air tourism, e.g. Dubai, would have considerable problems.

The company Dubai World is completely dependent on tourist travel to Dubai. The investments in projects such as artificial islands (shaped, among other things, to form a map of the world) and gigantic skyscrapers, were meant to be inhabited by rich tourists and business people that travel to Dubai by air. Even if the neighbouring emirate, Abu Dhabi, that has oil and money, gives new guarantees for Dubai’s debt, the fact remains that Peak Oil means that aviation cannot expand in future.

The investments that have been made in Dubai are based on prognoses similar to those that the International Energy Agency (IEA) makes every year. In this case what is important is not the latest edition of World Energy Outlook but the prognoses made 5 years ago. In 2004 the IEA considered that oil production in 2030 would be over 120 million barrels per day. The reality that we have now published in Energy Policy in our article The Peak Of The Oil Age is a maximal production of 75 million barrels per day in 2030.

In the future we will probably see many mistaken investments based on the overoptimistic prognoses from the IEA. The question is whether Dubai will be first of a long list.