Peak Oil News and Message Boards

What you won't find there or in current media accounts are his consistently failed predictions about rising supply in the last decade, supply that was supposed to result in a flood of oil. Here's one gem from 2006 in a piece he authored for Forbes Magazine: "A plausible forecast is that by the end of the decade the daily demand for oil will have expanded by 7 to 8 million barrels. If global production continues at present rates, it could grow by 12 to 15 million barrels per day in that period. In other words, there is more than enough oil in the ground." Maugeri's contention was that high prices would result in a supply response that would bring back the good old days of abundance. Of course, no one covering his recent policy brief bothers to mention that his 2006 prediction turned out to be wrong, and not by just a little. World oil production has been flat since 2005. His vaunted supply response never materialized.

Serial_Worrier wrote:I don't buy it. Gas prices are down, Costco was full. Olive Garden was packed on a Tuesday night. Everything seems ok.

efarmer wrote:Cultural abundance can be pushed around to spur growth and subsidize things and it is the credit and mortgage and loan arrangement that fostered American wealth gathering and growth traditionally. When we started on the path in 1998 to back off regulating or looking at the investment banks and rating agencies and gamed the system to provide hallucinated wealth at the lowest consumption level and also export American financial manure in Gold Foil pouches with Agency Ratings at AAA based on bogus insurance and financial tranched Spam offerings, we became global pirates. This does not get fixed soon or easily.

Hallucinated abundance is only a comfort while the vision of conucopia lasts.

A letter in a November 1999 edition of the Oil & Gas Journal, “Running Out of Oil,” written by an industry consultant, stated 11 facts and predictions. Far from unusual, his facts were generally correct and his prognostications mainstream. U.S. oil production was in decline in the 1990s. Oil imports were rising. This led George W. Bush to declare in his 2006 State of the Union Address: “America is addicted to oil.” Until around 2010, in fact, “Peak Oil” was in vogue both inside and outside the industry. Pro-oil voices urged greater public-land access and less regulation to increase otherwise declining production; anti-oil voices favored government subsidies and mandates to fashion a post-petroleum future. The aforementioned letter (by Jeffrey Hughes, President and founder of HTK Consultants) offered these facts and predictions circa 1999: World oil discoveries peaked in the 1960s. World oil production