Posted on 06/27/2014 9:14:34 AM PDT by thackney
The remnants of the peak oil community cling avidly to the belief that oil production has already peaked and that high prices prove this. “Look at the data” seems to have become a catechism amongst them, and it can be hard to dissuade them otherwise, especially by considering more than one variable as explaining oil supply and price.
Most anyone can understand that high oil prices are no more an indicator of resource scarcity than the occasional spike in coffee, pork or orange juice prices. Things happen that can cause prices to rise for a period before supply and demand can re-equilibrate, with oil particularly vulnerable to political disruptions–witness developments in Iraq, Iran, Libya, Nigeria to name the primary ones.
The funny thing is that high prices in the late 1970s were also considered evidence that “the oil and gas we rely on are simply running out,” as a president said. The vast majority of the expert community believed prices would continue rising in the 1980s and 1990s because “oil was different” and the drop in 1986 to long-term mean prices came as quite a shock to nearly everyone. (M. A. Adelman was a notable exception.)
Because of that, in part, most experts did not rush to attribute the higher prices post-2002 to resource scarcity, instead of to above-ground problems such as the invasion/liberation of Iraq and the strike and mass firings at Petroleos de Venezuela. Higher costs certainly suggest to some that “the cheap oil is gone” but many others, such as myself, consider them cyclically inflated, rather than reflecting exhaustion of the so-called “easy oil”.
The second problem with the claims of a production peak are that they usually are confined to crude and condensate, rather than total petroleum liquids...
(Excerpt) Read more at forbes.com ...
Conventional oil production peaked in 2005. US oil consumption peaked in 2007. Oil consumption in Europe is on the decline. Even China’s oil imports are no longer rising and are at a 9-month low. Yet the world has not come to an end.
Peak oil is so 9 years ago. The world is moving on to the next generation of hydrocarbons.
Gee, I wonder where Sam Kunaknana and the “Center for Biological Diversity” come up with the millions of dollars to hire armies of well-paid lawyers to fight these projects. Sam must be very well-to-do, and there must be a whole lot of grandmas sending $10 checks to the “Center for Biological Diversity.”
(See tagline)
The journal Technological Forecasting and Social Change has carried several articles pointing out the flaws of this approach to forecasting the limit of a growth curve using data from the lower half. The results can be badly misleading, and the method is not recommended for any forecasting use. (full disclosure: I'm on the editorial board of that journal).
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