by stillrobertpaulsen » Thu Mar 30, 2017 7:40 pm
Novem5er » Tue Mar 28, 2017 7:34 pm wrote:For the most part, Peak Oil has dropped off the radar. Some have said it's been debunked, as is evidenced by the recent energy glut. I take a different view, however. Peak Oil experts for a long time said energy companies would scramble to find ever more exotic means to recover oil from the strangest of places. They said deep-water drilling was only even profitable as the oil became more scarce and, thus, more expensive. I think excavation of oil/tar sands and the hydro-pumping of Saudi fields is simply more evidence of this. I think people just didn't realize that these exotic methods would work so well and would be relatively cost-effective.
But what happens when even these tricks start to produce diminishing returns? It's not like we've found billions of barrels of new oil. No, they just found a better way to get oil that they always knew was there. I think peak oil is still a very real danger, it's just that we've pushed in a decade or a generation into the future.
Your view is pretty much identical to mine. All the tar sands in Canada, all the shale rock in the Dakotas, and most of the deep-water fields have been known about since the '70s. The new technology has made them more cost-effective, but you're right: we haven't found anything new. Peak Oil is still an axiomatic predicament - it's not a question of if, like the debunkers wish it was - the question is when. My concern is that by depleting the non-conventionals in synch with the remaining light sweet crude that's being hydro-pumped, when we go past the Peak into permanent decline, it's going to be that much steeper, and consequently the economic upheaval will be more severe.
"Huey Long once said, “Fascism will come to America in the name of anti-fascism.” I'm afraid, based on my own experience, that fascism will come to America in the name of national security."
-Jim Garrison 1967
