6 ms·

‘Peak Oil’ Is a Waste of Energy

17 points by laika4000 17y ago

lupin_sansei 17y ago
I've noticed that peak oil is always now+10 years: http://www.google.com.au/search?hl=en&q=peak+oil+10+years&sourceid=navclient-ff&rlz=1B3GGGL_en___AU229&ie=UTF-8 http://www.google.com.au/search?hl=en&q=peak+oil+10+year... All you need to know about peak oil is "Are the reserves growing or shrinking over time?" http://www.theoildrum.com/uploads/12/opec_reserve_growth.gif http://www.theoildrum.com/uploads/12/opec_reserve_growth.gif http://www.nrcan.gc.ca/eneene/sources/petpet/images/refstrarafsur3-eng.png http://www.nrcan.gc.ca/eneene/sources/petpet/images/refstrar...
- patio11 17y ago
  You'll also note that "peak food" and "peak landfill space" didn't turn out to be nearly as insurmountable as people thought they'd be. (Anyone remember the total obsession with garbage we had for a few years in the late eighties early nineties? Like how we were going to cover the entire world with it if we didn't recycle everything? Turns out, um... global warming and peak oil!) Personally, living in Japan, I'm more concerned with "peak people" than any of the above.
  - aw3c2 17y ago
    Turns out we simply dump it to the oceans and create new continents where no one will see them.
ubernostrum 17y ago
I guess I don't really get it. Earth, the planet, is finite in mass and not all of that mass exists in the form of crude oil or equivalent raw sources of petroleum. Therefore there will be a point at which no further oil can be obtained. One is of course free to debate when that point will come, or when the inevitable decline toward that point begins, but the simple fact remains that a finite resource is, well, finite. And given the difficulty of predicting exactly when its finitude will catch up to us (i.e., the theme of this op-ed piece), it seems only prudent to have contingencies and alternatives in place well in advance.
- patio11 17y ago
  it seems only prudent to have contingencies and alternatives in place well in advance. Meh, the market works. As the supply of oil at a given degree of extraction difficulty decreases, the price of oil increases, which brings additional oil at the next higher level of difficulty into the profitable-to-extract region. Repeat ad nauseum. Eventually, there will be disruptive innovation and we won't need oil anymore. Disruptive innovation is similarly triggered by the increasing price of oil: the lower the economically viable supply, the higher the price, the higher the price, the greater the return to R&D to replace it with substitutes. All of this has happened before, and all of this has happened again. We used to use prodigious quantities of lamp oil, which was made from whale blubber. Kerosene happened. Then electricity happened to kerosene. We no longer have to worry about Peak Whale Oil.
  - sethg 17y ago
    If the price of oil were rising steadily over time as reserves were steadily being drawn down, then anyone contemplating an investment in alternatives would have a pretty clear idea what kind of return to expect, and all would be well. What concerns me is the combination of long-run rise and short-term volatility. When the price of crude goes up, small fuel-efficient cars become more effective and energy startups attract investment. When it goes back down, gas guzzlers come back into fashion and alternative energy is a hippie obsession that of course can't make money. I fear that at some point in the future, the price of oil will shoot up and stay up and the infrastructure that can maintain a First World standard of living in spite of $500/barrel oil will simply not be in place yet. The market will sort everything out in the long run, but "in the long run we are all dead" and I would prefer to die in an air-conditioned room.
  - chipsy 17y ago
    This is a topic discussed in economics - reducing scarcity through technology. For an example of how this has happened with other resources, look at metals. Aluminum and iron used to be much more expensive and scarce. Now they're pretty cheap, and to find out why, just total the savings of lots of tiny improvements like thinner soda cans, better sorting of recycling, lower-energy production methods, etc. If 50 people come up with cumulative improvements of 2% to a process, you end up with a 269% improvement. This is one of the reasons why software is so appealing - it's low-capital to distribute, and there are an unending number of tasks to automate, making it easy to come up with new approaches to improve productivity.
hristov 17y ago
Right .... I would sooner believe any crazy wacko peak oil theorist than an energy consultant saying that oil will settle at $30 per gallon soon. Currently oil is $70 per gallon AND we are in a global recession AND the middle east is as peaceful as it will ever be in the foreseeable future. The truth of the matter is peak oil will be very hard to predict because oil companies' reserve estimates are not very reliable, neither are the rates of future discoveries and future improvements of technology. In any event, the rational choice for the USA, as another poster pointed out, is to find alternatives now. Peak oil may or may not happen soon but it will happen eventually so that it will be very irresponsible not to have an alternative ready.
- jimbokun 17y ago
  You meant to say barrel, not gallon, I think.
Tichy 17y ago
I don't know about peak oil, but the style of that article reeks of revisionism. The classic approach: find some cherry picked quotes from the opposition that are obviously silly but happen to be actually quite irrelevant, and debunk them (in this case the stuff about water in the oil fields). I'd like more hard facts to make up my mind.
- papaf 17y ago
  I first heard about peak oil from an article in the Scientific American. It points out many things are are not debunked in the New York Time opinion piece: http://dieoff.org/page140.htm http://dieoff.org/page140.htm
jbellis 17y ago
Oh, right, what else can you expect from Fox News... Oh, NYT? Carry on.
RyanMcGreal 17y ago
Michael Lynch is a snake oil salesman. The run-up and collapse in oil prices is exactly what peak oil theory predicted, as any honest reading of the literature will confirm. * http://raisethehammer.org/blog/1183 http://raisethehammer.org/blog/1183 * http://raisethehammer.org/article/811 http://raisethehammer.org/article/811
- deleted 17y ago
  [deleted]
fishercs 17y ago
supply and demand, if there's a need for alternative energies companies will develop it and prices will lower.
steveplace 17y ago
His argument is full of selection bias. So, I will select my own evidence to show that he's a crock of shit. 1. Mexico production has been on a steep decline, and production from the Cantarell facility is steeply falling off. 2. We had an economic collapse and oil held at 33/bbl. 3. The infrastructure that needs to be built in Saudi to extract new oil is getting very complicated and expensive, because you can no longer throw a straw in the ground to pull oil out there. 4. There's a huge difference between the marginal value of a gallon of oil for an American vs. an Indian. A liter of oil is life changing for a Bangladeshi, but won't get me further than the next piggly wiggly in town. Anyways, that's a couple. As a disclaimer, this isn't my specialty so consider me to be a crock of shit as well. Here's some better sources with real data: gregor.us getrealist.com theoildrum.com They have actual numbers.
fburnaby 17y ago
The naming of a group as "peak-oil advocates" immediately flags this article in my mind as some form of propaganda. No one is "for" peak oil being reached. His attempt at argumentation about the amount of oil that's available is far beyond my ability to discredit and as a result, I'm completely agnostic on the issue. But I know to ignore any conclusion presented by this author when he applies such obvious slander and misrepresentation of his opponents. An obvious straw-man argument.

17 points by laika4000 17y ago

I've noticed that peak oil is always now+10 years: http://www.google.com.au/search?hl=en&q=peak+oil+10+years&sourceid=navclient-ff&rlz=1B3GGGL_en___AU229&ie=UTF-8 http://www.google.com.au/search?hl=en&q=peak+oil+10+year... All you need to know about peak oil is "Are the reserves growing or shrinking over time?" http://www.theoildrum.com/uploads/12/opec_reserve_growth.gif http://www.theoildrum.com/uploads/12/opec_reserve_growth.gif http://www.nrcan.gc.ca/eneene/sources/petpet/images/refstrarafsur3-eng.png http://www.nrcan.gc.ca/eneene/sources/petpet/images/refstrar...

patio11 17y ago
You'll also note that "peak food" and "peak landfill space" didn't turn out to be nearly as insurmountable as people thought they'd be. (Anyone remember the total obsession with garbage we had for a few years in the late eighties early nineties? Like how we were going to cover the entire world with it if we didn't recycle everything? Turns out, um... global warming and peak oil!) Personally, living in Japan, I'm more concerned with "peak people" than any of the above.
- aw3c2 17y ago
  Turns out we simply dump it to the oceans and create new continents where no one will see them.

ubernostrum 17y ago

I guess I don't really get it. Earth, the planet, is finite in mass and not all of that mass exists in the form of crude oil or equivalent raw sources of petroleum. Therefore there will be a point at which no further oil can be obtained. One is of course free to debate when that point will come, or when the inevitable decline toward that point begins, but the simple fact remains that a finite resource is, well, finite. And given the difficulty of predicting exactly when its finitude will catch up to us (i.e., the theme of this op-ed piece), it seems only prudent to have contingencies and alternatives in place well in advance.

patio11 17y ago
it seems only prudent to have contingencies and alternatives in place well in advance. Meh, the market works. As the supply of oil at a given degree of extraction difficulty decreases, the price of oil increases, which brings additional oil at the next higher level of difficulty into the profitable-to-extract region. Repeat ad nauseum. Eventually, there will be disruptive innovation and we won't need oil anymore. Disruptive innovation is similarly triggered by the increasing price of oil: the lower the economically viable supply, the higher the price, the higher the price, the greater the return to R&D to replace it with substitutes. All of this has happened before, and all of this has happened again. We used to use prodigious quantities of lamp oil, which was made from whale blubber. Kerosene happened. Then electricity happened to kerosene. We no longer have to worry about Peak Whale Oil.
- sethg 17y ago
  If the price of oil were rising steadily over time as reserves were steadily being drawn down, then anyone contemplating an investment in alternatives would have a pretty clear idea what kind of return to expect, and all would be well. What concerns me is the combination of long-run rise and short-term volatility. When the price of crude goes up, small fuel-efficient cars become more effective and energy startups attract investment. When it goes back down, gas guzzlers come back into fashion and alternative energy is a hippie obsession that of course can't make money. I fear that at some point in the future, the price of oil will shoot up and stay up and the infrastructure that can maintain a First World standard of living in spite of $500/barrel oil will simply not be in place yet. The market will sort everything out in the long run, but "in the long run we are all dead" and I would prefer to die in an air-conditioned room.
- chipsy 17y ago
  This is a topic discussed in economics - reducing scarcity through technology. For an example of how this has happened with other resources, look at metals. Aluminum and iron used to be much more expensive and scarce. Now they're pretty cheap, and to find out why, just total the savings of lots of tiny improvements like thinner soda cans, better sorting of recycling, lower-energy production methods, etc. If 50 people come up with cumulative improvements of 2% to a process, you end up with a 269% improvement. This is one of the reasons why software is so appealing - it's low-capital to distribute, and there are an unending number of tasks to automate, making it easy to come up with new approaches to improve productivity.

hristov 17y ago

Right .... I would sooner believe any crazy wacko peak oil theorist than an energy consultant saying that oil will settle at $30 per gallon soon. Currently oil is $70 per gallon AND we are in a global recession AND the middle east is as peaceful as it will ever be in the foreseeable future. The truth of the matter is peak oil will be very hard to predict because oil companies' reserve estimates are not very reliable, neither are the rates of future discoveries and future improvements of technology. In any event, the rational choice for the USA, as another poster pointed out, is to find alternatives now. Peak oil may or may not happen soon but it will happen eventually so that it will be very irresponsible not to have an alternative ready.

jimbokun 17y ago
You meant to say barrel, not gallon, I think.

Tichy 17y ago

I don't know about peak oil, but the style of that article reeks of revisionism. The classic approach: find some cherry picked quotes from the opposition that are obviously silly but happen to be actually quite irrelevant, and debunk them (in this case the stuff about water in the oil fields). I'd like more hard facts to make up my mind.

papaf 17y ago
I first heard about peak oil from an article in the Scientific American. It points out many things are are not debunked in the New York Time opinion piece: http://dieoff.org/page140.htm http://dieoff.org/page140.htm

jbellis 17y ago

Oh, right, what else can you expect from Fox News... Oh, NYT? Carry on.

RyanMcGreal 17y ago

Michael Lynch is a snake oil salesman. The run-up and collapse in oil prices is exactly what peak oil theory predicted, as any honest reading of the literature will confirm. * http://raisethehammer.org/blog/1183 http://raisethehammer.org/blog/1183 * http://raisethehammer.org/article/811 http://raisethehammer.org/article/811

deleted 17y ago
[deleted]

fishercs 17y ago

supply and demand, if there's a need for alternative energies companies will develop it and prices will lower.

steveplace 17y ago

His argument is full of selection bias. So, I will select my own evidence to show that he's a crock of shit. 1. Mexico production has been on a steep decline, and production from the Cantarell facility is steeply falling off. 2. We had an economic collapse and oil held at 33/bbl. 3. The infrastructure that needs to be built in Saudi to extract new oil is getting very complicated and expensive, because you can no longer throw a straw in the ground to pull oil out there. 4. There's a huge difference between the marginal value of a gallon of oil for an American vs. an Indian. A liter of oil is life changing for a Bangladeshi, but won't get me further than the next piggly wiggly in town. Anyways, that's a couple. As a disclaimer, this isn't my specialty so consider me to be a crock of shit as well. Here's some better sources with real data: gregor.us getrealist.com theoildrum.com They have actual numbers.

fburnaby 17y ago

The naming of a group as "peak-oil advocates" immediately flags this article in my mind as some form of propaganda. No one is "for" peak oil being reached. His attempt at argumentation about the amount of oil that's available is far beyond my ability to discredit and as a result, I'm completely agnostic on the issue. But I know to ignore any conclusion presented by this author when he applies such obvious slander and misrepresentation of his opponents. An obvious straw-man argument.