Oil consumption sits at the center of this film's math problem: in 2009 the world pumped and burned an estimated 84 to 85 million barrels a day, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, and that rate cannot hold forever. The film explains the Hubbert Curve, the production model Shell geologist M. King Hubbert proposed in 1956, which shows why every oil well and every oil-producing region follows the same arc: output climbs, plateaus, then falls to nothing. Rather than treating oil fields as a single tap that runs dry all at once, the film walks through how thousands of individual wells at different points on that curve add up to a global supply picture, and what happens as more of them tip into decline than start production. The question driving the film is what a modern economy built on cheap, abundant oil does when the curve turns downward for good, and whether alternative energy or a lower-consumption way of life fills the gap first.