Have a peek at Peak Oil

Panic mongering.

Prices may rise in the future, but it will be a long time before we run out. By then we will have moved on to other fuels

Their questions are basicly beating up strawmen.

"Can't We Just Look Harder for the Stuff?
What About the Oil Sands up in Canada
& Oil Shale over in the American West?"


Global oil discovery peaked in 1962 and has declined to virtually nothing in the past few years. We now consume 6 barrels of oil for every barrel we find. Significant new oil discoveries have become so scarce that oil companies are unable to earn back the money they spend exploring for it, despite record high oil prices.
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uhhhhh, we don't really need to discover any new batches of Shale Oil or Oil Sands. There's loads of that stuff. It won't last forever, but it will last long enough to encourage a shift to a more viable economy.

I seriously doubt the "6 barrells consumed for each found" figure.

They then claim that because it is economical unviable to produce oil from shale now then it will be forever. Wrong, guys, wrong.

Another one:

Most of the consumer goods you buy are made with plastic, which is derived from oil.
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We can get plastic from lots of other sources. We choose to use oil since it is relatively cheap, and uses stuff that would otherwise be thrown away directly.

This people don't know what they're talking about. They want a "Road Warrior" fantasy.
 
My pet peave with the article is it's use of the term "bell curve". That's almost always used to describe a gaussian distribution. But of course, what they're talking about isn't gaussian at all, even if you use their predictions. And as stated above, there's no real reason to think it would be shaped like that. Oil production likely will peak at some point in the future (don't count on anyone's prediction for when), but the decline is likely to be VERY much more extended over time than the initial increase.
 
Oil production likely will peak at some point in the future (don't count on anyone's prediction for when), but the decline is likely to be VERY much more extended over time than the initial increase.
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Why?
 
jay gw said:
Why?
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Because production rose to meet consumption which was rising at a stellar rate in post-WW2 world. However, while consumption is increasing (slowly), it is nowhere near what it used to be. Ergo, there is no demand for increased production.

Despite this, technology for finding, extracting and refining oil improves, so we have more oil fields, better methods of extracting, and so on.

So don't go cutting yourself from the grid just yet. Peak Oil has a big 'Planet X' problem going for it right now.
 
jay gw said:
Why?
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Which part why? Why will it peak, or why will it decline slowly?

I think it will peak because, as far as we know, it is not a renewable resource, and the supply (though very large) does appear to be finite. It would be great if that's not the case, but I wouldn't count on it. On the flip side, of course, I wouldn't be willing to bet anyone on WHEN the peak will happen. For all I know, it might not peak for another hundred years or more.

As to the extended tail, well, there's a lot of oil out there that's hard to get at. At current prices and with current technology, this oil is to expensive to obtain and is therefore not accessible right now. If oil production peaks, then that's pretty much guaranteed to start pushing up oil prices. As prices rise, successively more of these reserves will become accessible. So any decline in production is likely to be slowed due to the successive exploitation of more difficult-to-obtain reserves. That process could possibly drag out for a very long time.

The problem, though, is that even a leveling off of the oil output is going to cause problems: the world works fairly well on a global economy that's growing at a pretty fast rate, which in turn depends on a growing energy supply. If the energy supply saturates, then economic growth is limited to efficiency improvements, which are fairly slow. Nobody is quite sure how the global economy will work in a low-growth environment, but the potential for increased global instability is there. I'm not talking doomsday stuff, just a generally higher level of violence and strife. We would therefore like to be able to keep the growth of energy supply going, but that may not be possible, or maybe not at the rates we've seen over the last half century.
 
kookbreaker said:
Despite this, technology for finding, extracting and refining oil improves, so we have more oil fields, better methods of extracting, and so on.
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With physical limits of course, which we have not reached yet.


I would like to get your attension about that the oilfinds are getting smaller and occuring less often. This is one of the reasons to be critical of Micheal Lynch.


As I final note I would like to say that predicting the peak of oil-production is highly unpredictable, and the only thing that anyone can provide is after-the-fact information or a guess.
 
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