As a report commissioned by the US Department of energy shows, an emergency programme to replace current energy supplies or equipment to anticipate peak oil would need about 20 years to take effect.

For example, a variable could be set by invoking a function that supplies the value of the SESSION_USER special register to fetch the department number for the current user.

U.S. stockpiles of crude oil climbed by 2.93 million barrels to 354.2 million last week, leaving supplies 6.5% above the five-year average, according to the Department of Energy.