[Outcast_Searcher]

Dave - By all means: "I am a river to my people." LOL.Points if you know the movie I stole that line from. The greatest movie ever made IMHO.

In my world, Google is a thing. Such quotes aren't exactly hard to find, generally.

[ROCKMAN]

And for folks too lazy to Google: Lawrence of Arabia. Anthony Quinn's character after being accused of skimming from his tribe.

[Synapsid]

ROCKMAN,

Lawrence of Arabia? Very entertaining, indeed; don't know about great, though. Now, for great:

Anthony Quinn in Zorba the Greek, playing opposite a very young Alan Bates.

[ROCKMAN]

pstarr - Yes: just like the line from another of my favorite movies as the character reflects on the death of his father: "Grief...it's a process". IOW it's not just an emotion by a dynamic that changes over time. Just like our feelings about PO: good days and bad days. But in the end we're still just as dead as his old man. LOL.

[Tanada]

Rockman, just because Shell has suspended their efforts with $50.00/bbl oil does not mean nobody will dust those plans off again if oil sustains $125.00/bbl for a year or so.

[Revi]

We might have oil go back up in price again, but it won't get enough going to create another peak. By that time we will have dropped 13% off of the legacy fields, which will put us behind the eight ball enough so that another pile of condensates won't put us back over the peak. That's my 2 cents worth, anyway...

[Pops]

We might have oil go back up in price again,

it can't, its only worth $10/bbl

[ralfy]

The catch with high oil prices needed to support more exploration is that the former also leads to economic crisis.

[ROCKMAN]

ralfy - And thus the notorious/unimportant POD lives on. LOL.

[Pops]

I'm sure y'all remember this good old goody...



"The Arctic" and the super-deep, pre-salt Lula (owned by now junk-bond rated Petrobras) were probably imagined to be a good portion of that pretty blue undiscovered/undeveloped area.

Which isn't to say those will never produce, merely that the deep blue slope illustrates that declines in existing fields are a certainty and new discoveries and new production must always fight to offset.

[Subjectivist]

It would be nice if they updated the chart through 2014 with real data, that perfect yellow should be imperfect real world blue.

[Revi]

We went up a lot higher than that graph showed, thanks to enhanced recovery. All that is done now, so the downslope will be steeper as well.

[EdwinSm]

Ten years ago, when I bought a house in a rural village, we were arguing if Peak Oil would be in 2008 or even as late as 2012. At that time some of the more moderate people were expecting an 'undulating plateau'. Meanwhile the Cornucopias were expecting some form of technology to save the day.

As it turned out the Energy Fairy did pull a large fracking plum out of where the sun has not shone for millions of years (I don't go with the young oil theories).

Looking back it does seem that we have for some years now been on a undulating plateau that has been slowly rising.

I am not sure if on the supply side the Energy Fairy has any more plums to pull out. However, on the demand side, with China's growth rate slowing and its import of commodities dropping, with the EU back in deflation, and the US in a weak recovery (too weak to raise interest rates last time the Feds met), I expect that dampened demand might lead to the inability to use more oil and so prolong a demand-driven plateau.

My guess is that until the the economy implodes we might continue on a plateau for some years, with it possibly drifting down a little (as it has been slowly rising for the last few years).

[ennui2]

It would be nice if they updated the chart through 2014 with real data, that perfect yellow should be imperfect real world blue.

Seconded. I would like to see this updated.

[Plantagenet]

I'll third it----I want to see the chart updated as well.

And ideally the updated version should show the currently recoverable reserves of tight oil shale and other unconventional oil in addition to the conventional oil. The TOS and other unconventional oil could be shown with a different color.

Lets get the whole picture.

[GoghGoner]

Falling off now...

http://www.resilience.org/stories/2015-10-01/us-shale-oil-too-expensive-peaks-1h-2015

[ennui2]

Falling off now...

Due to a lack of demand, not geology, a lack of demand due to a glut, not "peak oil doom"(TM). Even my arch-enemy Planty will agree with me on this point.

When we see production declines AND sustained high prices, then that would be a strong signal for unstoppable geological depletion.

[ennui2]

Here is the link: Oil shocks redux now do your usual best to denigrate, distract, and deny. But maybe this time you'll add a little more other than derision and false hope?

That article doesn't really say anything to back your case. In fact, one of the linked articles classifies it as a "demand" and not a "supply" shock which flies in the face of the geological depletion narrative. Either way, it doesn't talk about collapse or donkey-carts. It's also a good 6 years out of date so I'd hardly consider its analysis authoritative.

[Pablo2079]

Isn't the undulating plateau different depending on where you are in the world? I'm not speaking from a gross production amount, but from the relative cost of the resource?

In the US, a high dollar results in lower cost oil. But from another country's perspective, $45 dollar oil can actually be ver expensive... especially if that country's currency has recently crashed (Brazil is a good example).

We'll all be impacted at some point, the question is when.

However, strictly speaking of production, I have to think we've fallen off. Rig counts are down... existing fields are dropping. Where is the excess production now?

[kublikhan]

While the US economy did enter a recession at the end of 2007, this was widely attributed to the collapse in consumer and business confidence that attended the subprime crisis and subsequent financial panic.

If supply shocks were the key factor behind the poor macroeconomic outcomes of the 1970s and early 1980s, why didn’t the most recent run-up in oil prices have similarly dramatic effects? As has been documented by a number of authors – including Hooker (1996, 2002), Blanchard and Gali (2007), and Nordhaus (2007) – oil shocks have had smaller macroeconomic effects since the early 1980s.

Thanks largely to an array of market reactions to higher energy prices after OPEC I and II, the US and other industrialised countries are now far less energy-intensive than they were in 1973. In the case of the US, the energy content of GDP (measured as the number of BTUs consumed per dollar of real output) has fallen dramatically since 1973 and is now about half of what it was then. By itself, this halving of the US economy’s energy intensity would also halve the macroeconomic impacts of oil shocks, with the reductions roughly equal for prices and quantities. We might expect substantially smaller contractionary effects following the more recent oil shocks because of the limited effect that oil prices now appear to have on core inflation.

Conclusions
In sum, the search for an explanation of why oil shocks have smaller impacts now than they did in the 1970s has not come up empty. Rather, it has turned up a long list of factors, no one of which appears to be dominant, but each of which may play some role. If that is correct, the supply-shock explanation of stagflation remains qualitatively relevant today, but it is less important quantitatively than it used to be. Thus with luck and sensible policy, food and energy shocks need not have the devastating effects that the supply shocks of the 1970s and early 1980s did.

Pstarr, did you link to the wrong article here? I can't find your quote in the article you linked to. Further, this author seems to fundamentally disagree with your positions on the causes of the great recession and the coupling of oil and economic growth. Did you mean to link to this article?

Will Collapse in Oil Price Cause a Stock Market Crash?