[MNJohnnie]

I can harldy wait to hear the Peak Oil Freepers try to explain this way. Add this to the Oil discoveres in Canada earlier this year and their dogma is looking more then a little thread worn.

[SubMareener]

We "God is making oil all the time" Freepers expected this!

[bybybill]

This is really bad news.It proves that global warming is a bad thing. See, the earth is heating up which caused all that oil to boil up and be discovered. Nah, I don`t know what I`m talking about, which puts me on a pare with ALGORE.

[woofie]

We are at Peak Oil its just that its Olive Oil

[umgud]

Oh, the greenies ain't gonna like this. Just when they thought we'd move to hydrogen or ethanol or veggie diesel.......... oh, woe is them.

I'll take good old cude oil every time.

[MAD-AS-HELL]

How did dinasaurs end up under water? GLOBAL WARMING MUST HAVE DONE IT!

[lentulusgracchus]

I can harldy wait to hear the Peak Oil Freepers try to explain this way.

There's nothing to "explain away". There will always be oil discoveries, some of them quite substantial. But you would have to have some super-gigantic totally unexplainable (by current science) accumulation, in order to break out of the box that encompasses existing reserves and the engineers' attempts to extrapolate the trends of discoveries and annual production to arrive at a "global estimated ultimate recoverable" reserves figure.

"Peak Oil" simply means that current levels of production are about the best we're going to be able to do. As we go forward, the decline of older accumulations' production rates offsets the incremental production rates of the newer discoveries. Given a finite oil reserve, it's mathematically inevitable.

The fallacy is in thinking that higher oil prices let you produce larger new resources. They don't. What higher oil prices buy you consists of two things:

• Management gives permission to explore new areas deemed "uneconomic" previously, so then you go out and discover a slew of log-normally distributed reserves accumulations. The big ones were always economic. What higher prices bought you was permission to go look for them in the face of B-school skepticism.

• Smaller accumulations within established trends and areas become economical to drill and produce, resulting in increased activity and increased production rates (or at least a hiatus in the rate of decline of a mature, declining production area).

[RobbyS]

In the 1920s they thought they were running out of oil and then Dad Joiner found the East Texas field, where the geologists had delared no oil can be found. Tha field alone produced enough oil to support the US military during WWII, while the German military machine was starving because of the lack of it. If Hitler had given Rommel enough troops to break through into the Middle East, the war would have taken a different turn.