Peak Oil Game
John Welch, Cabrillo College
Concepts and skills taught:
Production inevitably peaks before oil ‘runs out’
Production becomes more difficult as the ‘easy to reach’ oil is used up first.
Graphing data in Excel.
Materials needed: 1/4 teaspoons, ½ teaspoons, teaspoons, tablespoons, long handled spoons, larger
spoons, litter box scoopers, large bag of black beans (25 lbs?) and of garbanzo beans, 24 jars, 2-3 digital
scales (1000 g capacity), paper, notebooks, 30 second timer with alarm, small measuring cups, 3 small tubs
per team (or paper bags) and 2 larger tubs for the room.
Teams of 3-5 students each.
Game Goal: Teams are told that the team that ‘drills’ the most oil in the 10 year period is the winner. This
motivates them to try hard and makes it fun, but this goal doesn’t have much to do with the real educational
goals, as the students will see later.
To start – each team starts with one person as ‘driller’ and one person as ‘processor’. Each team has a set of
jars (oil field), a small spoon (1/8 teaspoon), and 3 containers (1 for processing oil, 1 for processed oil, and 1
for accumulated oil). There are a few larger bowls for group use and a depository of ‘tools’.
The jars contain black beans (oil), garbanzo beans (dirt, contaminate), and rocks. This is their “oil field”. They
can mine the oil from any jar in any order. The “oil” gets more and more diluted toward the bottom of the jars,
so they get less and have to do more processing as they go deeper. Also, there may be obstacles in bottoms of
jars, like rocks. They cannot pick up the jars, lean the jars over, use their fingers to extract beans, or pull out
the rocks. They are limited to using their spoons to scoop beans out of the jars.
Each round of the timer (30 seconds) is one “year”.
During each ‘year’, the goal is to get as much clean oil into the team’s ‘processed oil’ container as possible.
Penalties are charged for contaminated oil and for oil spilled outside the containers. Each team also has a bag,
box or tub that they can use as an intermediate ‘processing plant’ in which to glean out garbanzo beans. The
processing must take place along with the drilling and stop after the 30 second timer goes off.
When the timer goes off, all activity stops immediately and the following things happen (in order)
1) Penalties:
-dirt in the clean container: For each garbanzo bean in the clean container, remove two black beans
(along with the garbanzos).
- spilled oil: For each black bean spilled outside the containers, remove two black beans from the
clean container.
(these amounts can be estimated rather than having to make exact ‘bean counts’)
2) Discard all spilled and unprocessed oil into the communal waste container.
3) Measure the year’s production. Weigh the beans that remain in the clean container after the penalties and
record that year’s production in the team’s notebook.
4) Add the current year’s harvest to the team’s accumulated storage container. They will use this stored oil to
purchase tools and employees.
5) Buy better tools and hire more staff. Teams use their accumulated inventory of oil as cash to buy new
equipment and hire people. It’s best to have a set ‘price’ (like say 1 tablespoon oil to start with) for either a
new state-of-the-art tool or a new employee. After each round, the instructor announces the latest technology
(say a ½ teaspoon) and the current price, which should rise as the teams get richer.
Game goes on for 10ish years – depending on the interest level of the students. It’s important to keep it going
long enough so that each team’s production has started to decline.
Groups use excel or graph paper to graph yearly production.
Dicuss the shapes of the graphs. Talk about the peaks.
Compare to real oil production graphs, for US and world oil production.
(http://tonto.eia.doe.gov/dnav/pet/hist/mcrfpus2a.htm)
Questions for discussion:
Did the oil actually run out?
What percent of the original oil is left, roughly?
In what ways is this model similar to the real world?
In what ways is it different?
oil production
700
production in grams
600
500
400
300
200
100
0
0
2
4
6
8
10
12
year
Actual US Oil Production Data
Typical Student Data
World Production from Wikipedia
World Non-Opec Data
World Production on a larger time
scale.