"The cornucopian mindset is certainly rife among leaders in the oil industry (Rex Tillerson, CEO of ExxonMobil, recently said of climate change and energy security, “We [humans] have spent our entire existence adapting. We’ll adapt . . . it’s an engineering problem and there will be an engineering solution”)."
The Hill's Group is an affiliation of freelance engineers that have been working on the problem of world oil depletion for over two years. Over that period we have developed a model that is simple, mathematically and thermodynamically complete, and testable. We can conclusively demonstrate that world oil depletion is a function of the specific internal energy of crude oil, which is a constant. Our conclusion is that the world's oil reserves are in an advanced stage of depletion. There is no engineering solution to this problem; it can not be solved by increasing reserves. There is a specific, definable amount of reserve that will ever be be extracted - and no more. The problem results from the fundamental properties of the substance oil and the Second Law, and those can not be altered.
The term "Peak Oil" has been a most unfortunate choice of terms. Because of the term it is suggested that there will be a gradual downside to world oil production before it terminates. Our model demonstrates that other alternatives are possible, and even probable. The most probable senario is that production of crude oil will decline very slowly until wide spread shut-ins of major fields begin. The final stage of world oil production is more likely to resemble the fall of dominoes than the gradual decline projected by Hubbert's curve.
Because of this we find the comment of the CEO of EXXON distressing; either for its total lack of understanding, or for its disingenuous nature. Our methodology is not above the capabilities of any good engineer, and the oil industry has a plethora of them. It is very unlikely that we are the sole wards of this knowledge, and thus, it is very unlikely that Mr. Tillerson believes what he is saying.
As human beings we have a responsibility to our society. The continuance of our culture depends upon it. The comments of Mr. Tillerson and his piers appear to have the semblance of a troop of monkeys fighting over the last banana in a tree; at a time of great upcoming social stress they are hardly the responses that will be needed from our society's leaders.
The Hill's Group