

‘Peak Oil’ Is a Waste of Energy - laika4000
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/25/opinion/25lynch.html?pagewanted=all

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ubernostrum
I guess I don't really get it. Earth, the planet, is finite in mass and not
all of that mass exists in the form of crude oil or equivalent raw sources of
petroleum. Therefore there will be a point at which no further oil can be
obtained.

One is of course free to debate when that point will come, or when the
inevitable decline toward that point begins, but the simple fact remains that
a finite resource is, well, finite. And given the difficulty of predicting
exactly when its finitude will catch up to us (i.e., the theme of this op-ed
piece), it seems only prudent to have contingencies and alternatives in place
well in advance.

~~~
patio11
_it seems only prudent to have contingencies and alternatives in place well in
advance._

Meh, the market works. As the supply of oil at a given degree of extraction
difficulty decreases, the price of oil increases, which brings additional oil
at the next higher level of difficulty into the profitable-to-extract region.
Repeat ad nauseum. Eventually, there will be disruptive innovation and we
won't need oil anymore. Disruptive innovation is similarly triggered by the
increasing price of oil: the lower the economically viable supply, the higher
the price, the higher the price, the greater the return to R&D to replace it
with substitutes.

All of this has happened before, and all of this has happened again. We used
to use prodigious quantities of lamp oil, which was made from whale blubber.
Kerosene happened. Then electricity happened to kerosene. We no longer have to
worry about Peak Whale Oil.

~~~
mechanical_fish
_the market works._

Sure. But that's like saying "gravity works". As I jump off of a ledge, I do
so with perfect faith in gravity: There is almost certainly a time _T_ after
which I will be on the ground! [1] But whether I will be happy at time _t > T_
depends crucially on the actual shape of the terrain in front of me. A 1%
slope would be good. A ski slope, perhaps tolerable. El Capitan, not so much.

It will always be possible to buy _some_ quantity of oil at _some_ price. For
example, although it turns out to be far more difficult than you would think,
we can almost certainly synthesize oil from carbon and hydrogen. In theory.
But you wouldn't necessarily want to _burn_ the result: It depends on how much
effort it took to build the stuff.

The important question is: What does the demand curve for oil look like? How
much oil is available at each price point? And how long will it take to come
online?

And even if technology will someday make it possible to run a society of 7
billion people on oil shale, or nuclear fusion, that won't necessarily be any
consolation to us. Transition can be a bear. And real-world technology
research doesn't work like _Sid Meier's Civilization_ : It doesn't arrive on
schedule, and it might not arrive when it is most needed. If a genius tech
commentator of the 19th century had gone to famine-stricken Ireland and told
the starving farmers that their problems were solvable, that there were
technologies that could produce orders of magnitude more food than their
current technology, he or she would have been correct. But it wouldn't have
come as much consolation, because the agricultural revolution was a century in
the future and their kids were starving _right then_.

\---

[1] Unless I jump into a hole drilled completely through the earth. Or I
manage to put myself into orbit.

~~~
biohacker42
_The important question is: What does the demand curve for oil look like?_

I think the sane peak oil advocates are asking exactly that. It's not that we
are running out of oil, it's that we are running out of cheap oil. And that's
going to mess up the world economy. Things don't look good when oil goes above
$80 a gallon.

But I've heard that we can synthesis gasoline from air and water using
electricity from nuclear power. Anyone know what that costs per gallon?

------
hristov
Right .... I would sooner believe any crazy wacko peak oil theorist than an
energy consultant saying that oil will settle at $30 per gallon soon.
Currently oil is $70 per gallon AND we are in a global recession AND the
middle east is as peaceful as it will ever be in the foreseeable future.

The truth of the matter is peak oil will be very hard to predict because oil
companies' reserve estimates are not very reliable, neither are the rates of
future discoveries and future improvements of technology.

In any event, the rational choice for the USA, as another poster pointed out,
is to find alternatives now. Peak oil may or may not happen soon but it will
happen eventually so that it will be very irresponsible not to have an
alternative ready.

~~~
jimbokun
You meant to say barrel, not gallon, I think.

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lupin_sansei
I've noticed that peak oil is always now+10 years:

[http://www.google.com.au/search?hl=en&q=peak+oil+10+year...](http://www.google.com.au/search?hl=en&q=peak+oil+10+years&sourceid=navclient-
ff&rlz=1B3GGGL_en___AU229&ie=UTF-8)

All you need to know about peak oil is "Are the reserves growing or shrinking
over time?"

<http://www.theoildrum.com/uploads/12/opec_reserve_growth.gif>

[http://www.nrcan.gc.ca/eneene/sources/petpet/images/refstrar...](http://www.nrcan.gc.ca/eneene/sources/petpet/images/refstrarafsur3-eng.png)

~~~
patio11
You'll also note that "peak food" and "peak landfill space" didn't turn out to
be nearly as insurmountable as people thought they'd be.

(Anyone remember the total obsession with garbage we had for a few years in
the late eighties early nineties? Like how we were going to cover the entire
world with it if we didn't recycle everything? Turns out, um... global warming
and peak oil!)

Personally, living in Japan, I'm more concerned with "peak people" than any of
the above.

~~~
aw3c2
Turns out we simply dump it to the oceans and create new continents where no
one will see them.

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RyanMcGreal
Michael Lynch is a snake oil salesman.

The run-up and collapse in oil prices is _exactly_ what peak oil theory
predicted, as any honest reading of the literature will confirm.

* <http://raisethehammer.org/blog/1183>

* <http://raisethehammer.org/article/811>

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steveplace
His argument is full of selection bias. So, I will select my own evidence to
show that he's a crock of shit.

1\. Mexico production has been on a steep decline, and production from the
Cantarell facility is steeply falling off.

2\. We had an economic collapse and oil held at 33/bbl.

3\. The infrastructure that needs to be built in Saudi to extract new oil is
getting very complicated and expensive, because you can no longer throw a
straw in the ground to pull oil out there.

4\. There's a huge difference between the marginal value of a gallon of oil
for an American vs. an Indian. A liter of oil is life changing for a
Bangladeshi, but won't get me further than the next piggly wiggly in town.

Anyways, that's a couple. As a disclaimer, this isn't my specialty so consider
me to be a crock of shit as well. Here's some better sources with real data:

gregor.us

getrealist.com

theoildrum.com

They have actual numbers.

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Tichy
I don't know about peak oil, but the style of that article reeks of
revisionism. The classic approach: find some cherry picked quotes from the
opposition that are obviously silly but happen to be actually quite
irrelevant, and debunk them (in this case the stuff about water in the oil
fields). I'd like more hard facts to make up my mind.

~~~
papaf
I first heard about peak oil from an article in the Scientific American. It
points out many things are are not debunked in the New York Time opinion
piece:

<http://dieoff.org/page140.htm>

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fburnaby
The naming of a group as "peak-oil advocates" immediately flags this article
in my mind as some form of propaganda. No one is "for" peak oil being reached.

His attempt at argumentation about the _amount_ of oil that's available is far
beyond my ability to discredit and as a result, I'm completely agnostic on the
issue. But I know to ignore any conclusion presented by this author when he
applies such obvious slander and misrepresentation of his opponents. An
obvious straw-man argument.

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fishercs
supply and demand, if there's a need for alternative energies companies will
develop it and prices will lower.

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jbellis
Oh, right, what else can you expect from Fox News...

Oh, NYT? Carry on.

