Posted on 03/21/2008 9:55:51 AM PDT by kellynla
John Hofmeister, the Houston-based president of Shell Oil's U.S. operations, expressed doubt about the validity of peak oil theory in an appearance on CNBC's Squawk Box show.
"The peak oil theory has really swamped the world. God bless Matt Simmons," Hofmeister told CNBC anchor Carl Quintanilla, according to a transcript provided to WND by CNBC. "His assumptions are correct based on his hypotheses, but his hypotheses are too narrow."
Matt Simmons, a Houston-based investment banker who specializes in the energy industry, is widely known for his 2005 book, "Twilight in the Desert: The Coming Saudi Oil Shock and the World Economy," in which he analyzed oil depletion data from Saudi Arabian wells.
The peak oil theory argues the world's oil resources are finite and will be completely exhausted at a future date.Simmons, one of the most vocal and visible of the peak oil advocates in the industry today, has also been a frequent television guest arguing that the world is running out of oil.
In a recent YouTube.com-archived appearance on Bloomberg TV, Simmons argued the world has hit peak oil now, predicting prices as high as $300 a barrel
The peak oil theory, first espoused by Shell Oil geoscientist M. King Hubbert in 1956, has come under increasing criticism in recent years, as repeated predictions of world oil depletion have failed to match empirical data documenting increasing reserves.
For instance, data produced by the U.S. Department of Energy's Energy Information Administration currently shows 1.3 trillion barrels of proven oil reserves worldwide, more than ever in recorded history, despite a doubling in world oil consumption since the 1970s.
In what has become a contentious worldwide debate over whether peak oil is fact or fiction, Simmons dismisses statistics that are not consistent with his depletion models.
(Excerpt) Read more at worldnetdaily.com ...
ping
Oh good the article mentioned the oil finds on Titan.
If the dollar won’t stop it’s free fall, there will be nobody who can afford it. So yes, we won’t run out of oil.
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An oil man knows nothing about oil, after all.
The oil ran out in 1980.
What are these idiots talking about?
This is incorrect. This is the understanding of the Greenies. They are full of baloney. The real theory is somewhat more subtle and beyond their ability to grasp in the few moments between hits.
I guess we will never be able to access the Trillions of Bbls of oil sitting in the shales of our west?
Prices should naturally drop.
The market will naturally set a dynamic equilibrium between the usage and price of oil and its alternatives as the usage and price differences change. Only price-controls, nationalization, and ecofascism can gum up the works.
There is currently abiotic Carbon-13 created daily in the North Sea.
“Oh good the article mentioned the oil finds on Titan.”
Libs and the DBM, (redundant I know), want to ignore facts. Fossil fuel is not fossil fuel, it’s hydrocarbons. For a lot of years now, it’s been quietly observed that oil most likely is being produced deep in the planet by a process yet to be understood. They have gone back to dry wells and found oil in them. Could have been dinosaurs on Titan, but not likely.
The problem is, no one with clout has anything to gain by acknowledging that oil may well be a renewed resource. The oil companies want you to believe it will run out. The libs/greenies want us to quit using it to save the planet, so they’d like us to believe it will run out.
I don’t buy into the misinformation.
Nice idea. Needs work. Earth might have produced its oil abiotically but it took from then until now and we can suck it all up in a couple hundred years. Come back in a billion years and voila! we're in business again.
“Nice idea. Needs work. Earth might have produced its oil abiotically but it took from then until now and we can suck it all up in a couple hundred years. Come back in a billion years and voila! we’re in business again.”
Nice reply, needs work. Simply because you state something doesn’t make it fact.
Dry wells have been reopened, that is a fact.
“Dry wells have been reopened, that is a fact.”
Yep.
http://www.wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=38645
M. King Hubbert predicted correctly that US oil production would peak in the 1970’s and decline thereafter. It did.
The same model has been put accurately to international oil production.
The caveat to these models is the words “easy sources of oil”. Saudi oil is easy to get to. That kind of oil is peaking. The hard to get to stuff like oil shale or oil sands —even deep complex oil like stuff under north Dakota is not peaking.
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