The Peak Oil Lie, Petroleum is Plentiful

…I have written about peak oil before in LRC. The most recent piece can be found here. The basic thesis is quite simple: we are not running out of oil. Hubbert is as wrong as wrong can be. The facts backing up this assertion are simple: every year in the past 60 years has had more petroleum reserves at the end of the year than at the beginning. This is certainly an odd phenomenon to be sure for something that is dooming the entire planet. This is pretty much the exact opposite of what Hubbert forecasted. Let

Even if skeptics will quibble about the number I have chosen the point is still obvious: how can we be running out of something we always seem to have more of, even including the 100 million barrels or so that we consume each and every day. The balance of justice will tip in my favor, Hubbert is wrong and I am right at least in the short run. Clearly there is not an infinite reserve of petroleum because everything is finite in the very long run.

The gas giant planets of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune are largely composed of hydrogen and methane which indicates that crude petroleum feedstock is abundant in our solar system. Thus there is some reason to think that some of this lies in the interior of our planet which slowly but surely percolates through the rock to the upper layers of the crust. Along the way methane gets oxidized into longer chain molecule as byproducts of methanogen metabolism. Man sees rocks as solid, but scientists know that they are porous at the molecular level; a large sponge, retarding, and filtering, but not stopping migrations thanks to Archimedes