aadbrd wrote:I see this thread is 16 going on 17 years old. It's a marvel this forum has been up for this long without a database-reset.
I would think if I were to leave and come back in another few years that the circular talking points going on now would still be repeating themselves with no end in sight.
As long as petroleum products remain roughly in the surprisingly wide cost/price range that facilitates business as usual then you'll get more of the same. The probability of oil depletion suddenly kicking in such as to cause the sort of doomsday scenarios that popularized the peak oil movement during its heyday in the mid 2000s is highly unlikely. That won't stop a few die-hards from continuing to say otherwise.
First, oil depletion doesn't "suddenly kick in" it is ongoing, 24/7, that's kinda the whole point. Oil is finite yet our desire for it is infinite.
If you're just here to troll doomers let me know so I can put you on ignore and save us both the hassle, but if not, here is my take on where we've been the last bit.
Doomsday is simply when the supply of cheap energy can't match up to the desire. It is a variable armageddon, if the shortfall between how much people want and how much can be supplied —or substituted— is small, the price rises a bit and eliminates the desire for the least useful uses, that is, those uses with the least utility. Many people can afford to pull up their socks and spend a little less elsewhere to afford the same useless uses—their demand is "inelastic" to some point. Others though are forced to conserve right away, make some fewer trips, etc and their demand falls, so the market: supply/demand, balances at the higher price. The example is 1998-2015 when supply could not rise fast enough to meet rising demand, especially from China. At first people just paid the higher price, but storage and surplus capacity gradually fell and the price of oil rose above $150/bbl at one point.
The period from 2005-2015 had some of the highest average prices ever—even during the worst recession since the depression. As Ralfy points out demand would certainly have been much higher if more people had a job. Not a comforting thought.
Here is a great picture from Matt at CrudeOilPeak.info. The countries are arranged from those increasing production the most at the top, down to those declining the most at the bottom. The squiggly black line is US price.
Looking at the old chart on the wall, what happened in 2005 is obvious, supply flatlined and the price shot up. Even now after 15 years — 10 with the highest average real prices since the civil war, world production is flat except for the US territory formerly known as Iraq and US driller's ponzi scheme of LTO—and falling if you discount the Great Tar Mines of the north.
That's the other side of the equation, high price allows greater effort to be spent on extracting the fossils and the cash from investors. At least as long as consumers receive enough utility at the high price. But the key lesson from the last 17 years is that those record high prices for a record long period
have not increased the cheap/easy oil like they had every time in the past 150 years. You know what I mean, the kind like in the movies where you go to shoot a 'possum and get a gusher instead so move to Beverly Hills? The kind that supply 90% of the oil we burn. That last for decades, not just a few years or months.
I don't have a clue how many more Iraqs there are or how many more infill frack wells will be drilled. I also don't know how fast we will be able to substitute some other source or reduce our dependence. Those questions of course are the reason people, a few anyway, continue to go 'round and 'round here.
Generally, it feels to me like the prophets of PO Doom were about right, albeit somewhat overzealous. But between the recession, the mass-money-printing, the one-time "something" of high-price-enabled fracking (that all cornies said "they'd" think of), and the miracle of "refinery gain" we've not seen the full effect of the peak.
But it is clear the easily accessed pressurized puddles of petroleum that built this world have at least plateaued if not peaked in production. That's old news. How it shakes out from here is the interesting part.
The legitimate object of government, is to do for a community of people, whatever they need to have done, but can not do, at all, or can not, so well do, for themselves -- in their separate, and individual capacities.
-- Abraham Lincoln, Fragment on Government (July 1, 1854)