Peak Oil panic: Oil will run dry before substitutes roll out

Oh, please.
Let’s say the oil runs out in 20 years time. 90 years beyond that puts the date at which replacement technologies are ready at 2120.
Are we really saying that we can forecast what technology will be like in 2120? One hundred and ten years ago, we hadn’t even invented the aeroplane, and cars were still in their infancy.

Would this have been a problem if we hadn’t been throwing billions at a non-issue?

Petroleum is the renewable and sustainable fuel we have been “looking for”.
http://www.gasresources.net/

and how many reports have we seen like this since the ’60s all of them saying we should have run out years ago. And since when has the bourse been a good indicator? They missed the onset of this ‘great’ depression. Have these people got baked beans for brains or what?
[The bourse? Robt]

This is so stupid… This one piece is all that is needed to show what a bunch of crap “published” articles can be. If push came to shove replacement fuels could be in place in a decade. The Navy is already testing algae based oil.
No one knows how much oil there is. Any estimate on when it is gone is also garbage. There is lots of oil, but in places where people have restricted drilling.
Everything in this study is garbage. All of it.
John Kehr
The Inconvenient Skeptic

The date is generally 30-40 years from now, always has been, always will be.

Another bunch of idiots asking for more money! Some people never learn.

Can anyone say “nuclear power”?
This “alternative” is a robust, fully developed, technique for energy production.
The fact that it is not being meaningfully pursued by the U.S. is not due to a lack of “availability”, it is due to the impediments put into its path by “environmentalists”.

Unlikely. Every time peak oil has been predicted, new technologies have emerged to increase producible reserves.
Full disclosure: as of today I am an investor (part owner) in numerous wells either drilling or in production in Texas. The cashflow is about 8,000 x what my stock portfolio is doing in my IRA. So I’m good with being one of those “selfish big ahl bastahds.”
For example, “back in the day” it was thought that a single vertical well would “drain” 1,000 acres of field. Then it was reduced to 800. Then 400. Today it is expected that a single well will drain as little as 40 acres. This is important because it means that a lot of oil has been left in the untapped space between existing wells. This is exactly the areas we are currently drilling; practically zero risk of a dry hole.
Then we have the advances in horizontal drilling, which allows a single hole to tap as much oil as it used to take as many as 9 or 10 wells to produce. Huge efficiencies of scale.
Then we have the advances in “treatment” options, including the controversial hydrofracking. For those who don’t know, this is where a section of the well is temporarily capped off and high pressure water, along with various chemicals to make the water “slippery” are is pumped in to crack the rock in the producing zone. In some wells with a long horizontal leg, as many as 40 separate “stages” are fractured independently of each other. Along with the water, “proppants” (small ceramic beads -think poppyseeds) are pumped in to hold the fracture open when pressure is removed. All this effort is undertaken because it vastly increases the amount of oil or gas that is recovered.
The controversy is over the chemicals used in the fracturing process getting into groundwater. This is practically impossible because the upper zone of the hole is sealed off to prevent water table contamination, and the lower parts of the hole are well sealed by layers of impermeable rock – the same rock layers that hold back the oil. Whatever water exists at that depth isn’t potable and can’t be used for consumption anyway In my opinion this controversy is vastly overblown, but I’ll give those opinions some other time.
But I digress.
I just wanted to point out how technology has historically pushed back the “peak oil” limits. There is no reason to expect that it would not continue until alternatives are available.

“market forecasts of future events, representing consensus predictions of a large number of investors, tend to be relatively accurate.” REALLY!

And the big oil discoveries just keep on coming 🙂
New ultra-deep pre-salt offshore find confirms Brazil an oil giant
“Brazil’s oil industry regulator announced Friday that a recent ultra-deep offshore find is estimated to hold between 3.7 billion and 15 billion barrels of oil equivalent, which could make it the largest crude accumulation in the country’s pre-salt region and the biggest discovery in the Western Hemisphere in more than three decades.”
http://en.mercopress.com/2010/10/30/new-ultra-deep-pre-salt-offshore-find-confirms-brazil-an-oil-giant?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=daily

How stupid are these people? The reserve of oil will increase as the price goes up. They don’t know when it will run out. Other alternative technology may be available in 10 years or next year for all they know. It doesn’t explain the 90 year gap like they know how long it would take to develop alternatives. It is so stupid that it is hard to believe that it isn’t intentionally misleading. I guess they don’t understand the concept that necessity is the mother of invention or how free market economies work.

Be afwaid . . . be vewy, vewy, afwaid.

If oil ran out next year, I wouldn’t be stuck, and neither would you. No new technology is needed either. We have enough natural gas to last … depends on how you count it but it is a rather long time. The conversion for an automobile is a tad expensive. On the other hand, if the price of gasoline doubled or tripled, I would save money doing the conversion. (My wife drives way less than I do and converting her car might not pay off.)
Yes, I realize that the cost of natural gas would go up if we suddenly ran out of oil but it is really plentiful and it wouldn’t take much price increase to bring a lot more reserves on line.
Yes, I realize that all of the above is hypothetical because we aren’t going to run out of oil very soon. By the time it becomes a problem, NG and dual fuel cars will become available at a reasonable premium over gas models.

What the study actually says is that today’s expectations are that such gap will occur. But today’s expectations are often wrong. By 1870 some eminent scientists were (wrongly) predicting the end of coal, and nobody forecast the appearance of oil or the widespread difussion of electricity. Nobody predicted personal computers.
If only the authors had limited themselves to say that they found investors BELIEVE certain things to happen in the future, instead of going as far as suggesting that those things WILL actually happen. The latter tells you something about future reality, which nobody knows and they didn’t investigate, while the former just tells you something about investors’ current beliefs and behaviour, which is the actual subject matter of the research.

I enjoy reading nonsense conclusions such as this article reaches. Makes me real sad, though, seeing all those tax dollars being spent on university educations. And those that make such statements wonder why the people who actually do real stuff for a living, as most of us do, look sideways at ‘epidemics’ and understand why places of learning are frequently built on hills outside of town – so they are safe from the citizenry!

There really should be a “truth or consequence” associated with academics who engage in spouting scare stories. I can think of a bunch of appropriate penalties….

So how much did this drive the oil prices on the market?

Ha ha ha! This study seems to say – ‘the market knows best’, but the author then goes on to say – the solution is to DISTORT the market? I mean – really.
Let me tell you – there is a HUGE incentive for an entrepreneur to create the worlds next energy source. It doesn’t need to be mandated by Government….

I’d also note that many alternate technologies, such as tar-sands and coal-to-gas, won’t get any significant investment while the long-term average price of oil is cheaper. What kind of fool would spend billions of dollars to build a plant that can only operate at a loss?

Well somebody better turn out the lights then; because silicon solar cells probably won’t be economically affordable when oil reaches those astronomical levels.
The most annoying thing about having the oil run out; is that to replace it you need sand; lots of sand to make all those solar cells.
Guess who’s sitting on all the sand ?
I saw what purported to be a NEWS bulletin over the weekend; that said that Thorium was the answer to all our energy needs; a piece the size of a ball mouse ball had as much energy as a ton of Uranium; and who knows how many million tons of coal; and it is “almost impossible to make a bomb out of Thorium.” Hey they said it; not me.
Then the pretty NEWS reporter turned the discussion over to an actual Nuclear expert; and he said it is “almost impossible to make a reactor out of Thorium.”
Well you get the idea; hey maybe we can import oil from the moon or Mars; come to think of it we haven’t discovered any dinosaurs there yet.
Hey I don’t know when the oil is going to run out or if it is; but I AM in favor of not wasting it; and also in researching all other CREDIBLE sources of energy.
Water and CO2 are NOT sources of (chemical) energy.

This is wrong on so many levels. If oil was more expensive other energy technologies would be viable. The market is telling them that other technologies are not currently viable and they twist it around in knots until they can come to the conclusion that they should be wasting our money on alternative energy. When oil starts to run out, coal gas and nuclear will tend to replace them. Electric vehicles may even become cost efficient. The only special thing about oil is that it is a liquid high density energy source. The only place where that is a significant advantage is motor transport and if it runs out it will be an awful lot more cost effective to switch to natural gas or some sort of coal than windmills or solar panels for the forseeable future. The fact that the media publish this nonsense with a straight face is testament to the extent political correctness has replaced common sense.

Do you know what happens when sea living beings die? …Yes! you got it!, they fall to the abyssal waters at the bottom of the seas and there they decompose to methane (CH4): Calthrates, HYDROCARBONS. Then FOSSIL FUELS are constantly produced at the bottom of the seas. Not only that but, Global Warmers’ blessed CO2, reacts with Calcium IN LIVING BEINGS as Oysters, You and Me, etc to form calcium carbonate CaCO3 (“lime”) which when under pressure (in those depths Al Gore likes so much for being HOT) reacts with water to form, again, HYDROCARBONS, i.e. NOT SO “FOSSIL” BUT BRAND NEW FUELS.
Then, you guys have succeeded in making fools believe oil is running dry….so, instead, OUR WALLETS are running dry, with an oil price that should be about US$10/barrel and it is artificially, at US$85/Barrel. You won babies!, be happy!

These guys never learn…
“In a televised address on April 18, 1977, president Jimmy Carter delivered a chilling prediction: “Unless profound changes are made to lower oil consumption, we now believe that early in the 1980s the world will be demanding more oil that it can produce. … Within 10 years we would not be able to import enough oil from any country, at any acceptable price.”
Instead, within 10 years the price of oil collapsed. In mid-1986, the price of a barrel of oil tumbled to US$10 a barrel. Prices struggled upward in the later 1980s, but except for a brief spurt upward during the Gulf War, oil remained cheap until the end of the century. “

Milwaukee Bob says:
November 9, 2010 at 9:35 am
Love the cartoon! Apeakolypse Now
“Apocalypse (Greek: Ἀποκάλυψις Apokálypsis; “lifting of the veil” or “revelation”) is a disclosure of something hidden from the majority of mankind in an era dominated by falsehood and misconception,…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apocalypse
Fortunately IT IS happening now, but LITERALLY…andHERE IN WUWT!!!!:
a disclosure of something hidden from the majority of mankind in an era dominated by falsehood and misconception

They have been saying we are “running out” for as long as I can remember. We *may* be running out of CHEAP oil. There is PLENTY of more expensive, harder-to-get-to oil out there, much of it located in North America.
I do not think there is anyone alive on this planet that will still be alive the day the planet officially runs completely out of oil…

Peak oil has to to with two very real problems. First, as oil becomes harder to extract, it eventually reaches a point where the amount of energy to extract the oil is equal to or greater than the amount of energy derived from the oil extracted. That’s called EROEI (energy return on energy investment). When the two are equal, there is no longer any point in using available energy to extract the same amount of energy, and you might as well start selling the energy you already have. Did you ever wonder why you see some oil pumps idle in a field while others are pumping? It’s about the cost of extraction versus the current value of the oil. As any oil man knows, eventually wells become too expensive to operate energy wise, and so do whole fields. This is not an economic thing, it’s an energy-in versus energy-out thing. Yes, there is still oil in the ground, but you have to calculate the amount of energy needed to get it out against the energy derived from it. New, more efficient, extraction technologies may help, but ultimately you still bump up against the same problem.
The second problem has to do with the exponential growth of world economies and their resulting use of energy. You have to think about doubling times in exponential growth. Gradually oil and coal become harder to extract, but before you ever get to the point where EROEI is equal, you have such a demand upon fossil fuel use, together with the increased costs due to the energy used in extraction, that fossil fuel becomes prohibitively expensive.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a warmist, and I am not a “pie-in-the-sky” person who believes we can supplant fossil fuel with windmills, solar cells and ethanol. People who follow that line of thinking are naive. We need to build nuclear plants, and we need to build them fast. We also need more hydrothermal and hydroelectric plants, and because the development of these technologies is energy intensive, we need to start now before we reach “Peak.”
Peak is going to occur, sooner or later, and when that happens, I wouldn’t want to bet on what things will be like, since our whole economy (in fact, virtually everything in modern culture) is completely dependent upon “cheap” energy. Did anyone happen to notice that the current recession was PRECEDED by a huge jump in fuel costs? I believe that was an early symptom.

Not to mention coal. It has been estimated that there are over 847 billion tonnes of proven coal reserves worldwide. http://www.worldcoal.org/home/
Proven reserves are those which, like oil and gas, are economic with current technologies and prices. They are not the total of what is known, nor do they include what has not yet been been discovered. What has not yet been discovered is not because it is hard to find but because there is no need to look yet as the proven reserves are sufficient: coal for 119 years, gas 63 years, oil 43 years. There are also the reserves that are not accessable due to green policies.

In a private board room at the international Headquarters of Mobil, they told me we would run out by 1992. This was in 1981. Today I can tell you were there is an incredible amount of oil that is nearly untouched. I can also admit that even Oklahoma has not even produced 15% of their known reserves.

Jay Curtis
What interesting observations. Wouldn’t you agree that it isn’t really the amount of energy required for extraction, processing, and delivery, but the cost of that energy? Cost relative to price received for delivered processed product? Pumping oil with cheap hydroelectric energy is one thing, pumping it with pricey #2 is another thing altogether. Delivery by cheap electric pump – different from truck delivery.
There’s also the issue of cost of alternative energy for different purposes. Load following major generation facilities are one market, short haul delivery trucks are another. Where there is no practical alternative, and the trip is necessary, oil can cost a lot and still make sense as vehicle fuel. But maybe not in other uses.
I can see you don’t think this thing is simple either, but maybe it isn’t beyond belief that so called fossil fuels could be with us for quite a long time to come and that the constituency of the demand and its total will adjust as the stuff becomes scarcer.

Last year the world bank lent South Africa a couple billion for a coal to liquids processing plant.
We have little to spend to convert vehicles to natural gas. Natural gas condensate or liquids can be used for gasoline refining. We always need to conserve. We don’t worry about waste because we will run out tomorrow.
The presenting problem is a political movement to demonize the oil industry.

Actually, I think the conclusion of this study (90 year gap between peak oil and replacement of oil by “renewables”) is a serious underestimate. IMHO the “gap” will be made pretty much infinite by nuclear/thermonuclear technology.

Ho hum. I was working on Das Island in the Persian Gulf in the late 1960s and was reliably informed, many times, that oil would run out in 25 years.
I also believe in abiogenic oil.

“Our results suggest it will take a long time before renewable replacement fuels can be self-sustaining, at least from a market perspective,” said study author Debbie Niemeier, a UC Davis professor of civil and environmental engineering.
Two key elements of the new theory are market capitalizations (based on stock share prices) and dividends of publicly owned oil companies and alternative-energy companies. Other analysts have previously used similar equations to predict events in finance, politics and sports.
——————————————————————————————————————-
What I can’t reconcile is why a professor of civil engineering is messing with a study of marketing. Seems like a square peg in a round hole to me.
Douglas

Russian Abiotic Theory of Oil suggests oil is a renewable resource formed at much deeper layers in the crust and not from organic life forms.
Charles Higley mentioned this earlier and I have suggested in Tips and Notes that a post on this would be very informative for some of us who read but are essentially ignorant.
Climate Realists produced a piece on this with links on 8th Sept. 2010.

We have another Oil will run dry article which analyzes investor actions in commodity markets to predict technology achievements 90 years hence. Do the authors of this intellectual work run in the same social circles as the people who told us that Carbon Trading Markets would become a 10 trillion dollar a year enterprise?
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/11/08/public-carbon-trading-dead-in-the-usa/
To get a perspective of technology advancement, consider a person who gets their first introduction to the writings of Jules Verne on an IPAD pondering technology advancement possibilities for the next 90 years. When the replacement for liquid fuels arrives, it will be well before we run out of petroleum, and in all possibilities will not even be a liquid.

This smacks of computerized climate modeling. Garbage In, Garbage Out.
It also says a lot about peer-reviewed scientific articles.

@Dr Watkins
> Russian Abiotic Theory of Oil suggests oil is a renewable resource
> formed at much deeper layers in the crust …
That Climate Realist link is here:
http://climaterealists.com/index.php?id=6261
But it overlooks the work of Thomas Gold (who may have been inspired by earlier Russian work), one of the great scientists of the 20th century
One of the objections to the abiogenic theories was the presence of microbes in the petroleum. But it was Gold who pointed out the “deep hot biosphere”,including microbial life deep in the Earth that does not depend on solar insolation for energy.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC49434/pdf/pnas01087-0355.pdf

I give the abiotic oil formation theory a good chance of being accurate. That is also why the big oil companies may be the big money behind AGW. If oil was in nearly unlimited supply what would happen to their profits? The companies may be ones who want out of the business before that loss happens, IMO. (Al Gore is Occidental Oil and who funds the Sierra Club,etc? Foundations run by money from big oil. And why have they closed so many refineries and capped so many wells? Also aren’t there just too many news stories out recently that try to infer that oil and gas are so dangerous?) Looking for the ruse in the ruse in the ruse, usually ends up making more sense than what is taught to us by the medias — books, textbooks, newspapers, TV or radio. Please don’t misunderstand as I am against AGW but it is a manipulated theory from both sides — and it is just one of many.

DirkH says:
November 9, 2010 at 11:28 am
“Here, found the formula and a description:
http://www.nanowerk.com/news/newsid=18911.php
“This formula gives T ≈ 131 years for replacement of gasoline and diesel. ””
I have the feeling that they used a formula – that might even be right – that says we’ll probably be replacing oil in 131 years. But their assumption that petroleum will run out in 40 years does not come from that formula, but they just use the currently known reserves for that. We all know that that is wrong – new reserves will be found (if your opinion is different, wanna bet?).
So, assuming the formula does really give us a peek into the future, what it says is only that it will take 131 years to replace petroleum – from which i would deduce that the market seems to say: Don’t worry about petroleum for the next 131 years.
And that’s how i read the market as well, so the formula might even be useful.

This is nonsense. We already have replacements — they just aren’t cost competitive. For example, compressed natural gas is already used on many vehicles, and there are no indications that we’re at Peak Natural Gas. Combine that with biofuels, and there you go. Fuel problem solved until an even better breakthrough technology comes online.

tj says:
November 9, 2010 at 11:43 am”
“[…]If oil was in nearly unlimited supply what would happen to their profits? The companies may be ones who want out of the business before that loss happens, IMO.”
Very good – but they would not want out of the business. By artificially creating scarcity, they could keep the price higher, and vastly increase their margins. This explains why the CRU is partially oil-funded.

I remember being told in the ’70s that we’d be out of oil by 2010 and coal by 2050. And we still don’t have those flying cars yet, though the Dick Tracey watch phone did pretty much come true (cell phones).

“”””” Jim says:
November 9, 2010 at 11:34 am
*****
George E. Smith says:
November 9, 2010 at 9:25 am
*****
Wow, George. Looks like you did an incredible amount of research on thorium (NOT!).
Take a look at http://energyfromthorium.com/2010/05/03/new-job-with-teledyne-brown-engineering/ “””””
No I didn’t ! Where the heck did you get that idea. I simply gave a brief non-verbatim precis of what I just caught in passing while watching a foreign T&V presumably news pprogram; and what two people had to say about it.
I didn’t and don’t intend to spend another minute on researching it. If it happesn it will happen with or without me.
PS I don’t think I said before that I started out as a Nuclear Physicist; found it very interesting; but too confining because of the security issues around it (about which I don’t complain; just decided to not choose that as my long term career.)
I believe I said it was their words and not mine !

While reading about the spreading desert areas a while ago, here’s a quote I found:
“Desert weed, if farmed, could shorten gas lines. Dr. Melvin Calvin studies a common California shrub called a gopher plant, Euphorbia lathyris. The latex it yields can be refined into crude oil and gasoline. Dr. Calvin, who won a Nobel Prize for his photosynthesis research, estimates the production cost at $30 a barrel, a price that seemed noncompetitive…until recently.”
NatGeo mag. November 1979 p.617

I thank God for the complete and total economic collapse of the USA so the subsidy money can get cut off for everything.

J Ferguson & Ben D;
“Wouldn’t you agree that it isn’t really the amount of energy required for extraction, processing, and delivery, but the cost of that energy?”
Nope.
That is the point. It isn’t about the financial (i.e. “dollar” cost of the energy). It is about the ENERGY cost of the energy. The dollar cost is simply an expression of the (real) energy cost. (Money is nothing more than stored energy.) You can substitute other, i.e. cheaper, sources of energy to extract oil, coal or natural gas, but ultimately there is always an energy cost to the extraction process. If natural gas is cheaper than pumping and processing crude, then why are you wasting time with crude? SELL THE NATURAL GAS you control, because there will ultimately be more of a demand for that.
Think about how markets operate. Sooo, you go to natural gas, then that becomes expensive to extract (energy wise and financially). You go to coal liquification, etc., etc. They all end up in the same place. There is an energy cost to extracting any fossil fuel, and eventually, when it zeros out, you are done. Yeah. You could use geothermal or hydroelectric to pump oil, but why are you selling oil at a premium given the tremendous amount of energy it costs to get it out? You are better off putting that geothermal energy into the grid and encouraging people to drive electric cars. Maybe we will find highly efficient means of extracting oil, coal and gas. If we do, why not simply use that technology to supplant everything we’re doing now? It’s still energy.
Other commodities are different. You could theoretically continue to extract gold as long as the price goes up, putting in as much energy as you could find while the price was right. Commodities other than fossil fuels bare a different relationship than energy for energy. (It is scary to think about what happens to food prices as the dollar cost of energy goes up.) Ultimately, once EROEI is equal, it makes no sense to do anything but sell the energy you already have or find sources other than fossil fuels.
When do we get there? I don’t know, but the exponential function continues to operate and ACCELERATE. That’s what exponential functions do. That is why we now have 6.5 or 7 billion people in the world – all seeking energy. There were only about 3.5 billion when I was in college 40 years ago. So, we’ve nearly doubled in 40 years. In the absence of a world-wide pandemic or nuclear holocaust, will we double again in 20?
Jay

DirkH says:
November 9, 2010 at 12:34 pm
DirkH says:
November 9, 2010 at 11:57 am
“This explains why the CRU is partially oil-founded.”
Sorry, typo – funded, not founded.
founded is still correct!

peak oil is just another scam to take your money and freedom.
50 years ago the dinosaur bones crowd told russia they had no oil. now russia is the number 2 oil producer in the world. besides russia, they have also found hydrocarbons on numerous moons around the solar system…let’s see, dinosaurs on…hyperion?
http://www.oilgeopolitics.net/Geopolitics___Eurasia/Peak_Oil___Russia/peak_oil___russia.html

allright. one post appears and one post dissapears…twice
WUWT?
http://www.oilgeopolitics.net/Geopolitics___Eurasia/Peak_Oil___Russia/peak_oil___russia.html
[I have no idea. 8<) Robt]

Crock, meet S**t!

DesertYote says:
November 9, 2010 at 11:06 am
“Just a silly question; suppose that we stop using petroleum based fuels for transportation and energy, what are we going to do with the stuff? I mean it is not good for anything else, that is why we burn it.”
DesertYote try this on for size:
A partial list of products made from Petroleum (144 of 6000 items)
One 42-gallon barrel of oil creates 19.4 gallons of gasoline. The rest (over half) is used to make things like:
Solvents
Diesel fuel
Motor Oil
Bearing Grease
Ink
Floor Wax
Ballpoint Pens
Football Cleats
Upholstery
Sweaters
Boats
Insecticides
Clothesline
Curtains
Food Preservatives
Basketballs
Soap
Vitamin Capsules
Antihistamines
Purses
Shoes
Dashboards
Cortisone
Deodorant
Footballs
Putty
Dyes
Panty Hose
Refrigerant
Percolators
Life Jackets
Rubbing Alcohol
Linings
skis
TV Cabinets
Shag Rugs
Electrician’s Tape
Tool Racks
Car Battery Cases
Epoxy
Paint
Mops
Slacks
Insect Repellent
Oil Filters
Umbrellas
Yarn
Fertilizers
Hair Coloring
Roofing
Toilet Seats
Fishing Rods
Lipstick
Denture Adhesive
Linoleum
Ice Cube Trays
Synthetic Rubber
Speakers
Plastic Wood
Electric Blankets
Glycerin
Tennis Rackets
Rubber Cement
Fishing Boots
Dice
Nylon Rope
Candles
Trash Bags
House Paint
Water Pipes
Hand Lotion
Roller Skates
Surf Boards
Shampoo
Wheels
Paint Rollers
Shower Curtains
Guitar Strings
Luggage
Aspirin
Safety Glasses
Antifreeze
Football Helmets
Awnings
Eyeglasses
Clothes
Toothbrushes
Ice Chests
Footballs
Combs
CD’s & DVD’s
Paint Brushes
Detergents
Vaporizers
Balloons
Sun Glasses
Tents
Heart Valves
Crayons
Parachutes
Telephones
Enamel
Pillows
Dishes
Cameras
Anesthetics
Artificial Turf
Artificial limbs
Bandages
Dentures
Model Cars
Folding Doors
Hair Curlers
Cold cream
Movie film
Soft Contact lenses
Drinking Cups
Fan Belts
Car Enamel
Shaving Cream
Ammonia
Refrigerators
Golf Balls
Toothpaste
Gasoline

In his 1956 paper M. King Hubbert Predicted US Peak Oil production would happen in 1970, it did.
Hubbert also predicted in 1956 that World Crude Oil production would peak “in about half a century” — putting it at 2006.
World Crude Oil Production 2000 – 2009 in Thousand Barrels/day
2000 77,768
2001 77,686
2002 76,988
2003 79,593
2004 83,098
2005 84,589
2006 84,652
2007 84,535
2008 85,478
2009 84,391
World Oil Production Including Lease Condensate, NG Liquids, Other Liquids, and Refinery Gains has declined every year since World Oil Production had its most prolific year in 2006
http://www.eia.doe.gov/ipm/supply.html click on 4.4

with the exception of 2008

Which if it holds up is a pretty good prediction from 1956 52 years vs “about half a century”

Seeing as we seem to have a fair few peak-oilers in this thread, can anyone explain to me what the concept actually represents? This is a serious question, because either I’m missing something, or ‘peak oil’ is an utterly trivial statement that, as finite resources become closer to exhaustion, the price will rise. The semi-mystical pronouncements surrounding it don’t seem to make any sense to me, because people seem to talk about tipping points and the like.
Anyone care to take a stab at explaining for me?

Years ago, a lot of sophisticated investors thought railroads were a good investment too.

“”””” DesertYote says:
November 9, 2010 at 1:25 pm
#
#
Jim G says:
November 9, 2010 at 12:57 pm
“Davis was never, and still ain’t, Cal Tech.”
#
I investigated them decades ago when I still wanted to be a wildlife biologist or an ichthyologist. Took one look around and went running for the hills. Scary place but not as scary as Berkley! “””””
And even Beserkely ain’t nearly as scary as Pasadena; which is where Ca-lTech actually is.
But if NASA can move land based Weather stations off shore or 300 km from where they were when they were built; and you can use your backyard thermometer to read the Temperature 1200 km away; then I suppose it is easy to get Cal-Tech soemwhere around Berkeley.

I have not bothered reading this article. Simply because its about investor sentiment.
However, reading many of the comments suggest it is time to put a few myths to bed.
1. Oil runs out. No. That is not what PO is about. PO is the point at which you cannot maintain flow rates to meet demand.
2. The abiogenesis of hydrocarbons. Look, if you want to believe this, its up to you. A brief search on the web should put you right. However consider this: If abiogenesis occurs and has done so throughout the the life of the earth, why are we not knee deep in oil? Abiogenesis doesnt really stack up if you are in the business of oil and gas exploration. We find oil where we have three prime ingredients. Source rock, reservoir, cap rock. Without the kerogen rich source rock, you dont get the oil. If deep earth abiogenesis is true, why do we not see seeps at the constructive margin in the Atlantic or on Iceland?
3. ”Brazil and Greenland and the Falklands proves there is still oil to get”. These are nice – to – haves, but they are not supergiants such as Ghawar, Burgan, Samotlor, Cantarell. The supergiants were all found between ca. 1940 – 1970. Since then, supergiants have been few and far between. The North Slope and the North sea are oil provinces made up of various sizes of fields that kind of add up to a basinal supergiant, Both , I hasten to add are post-peak. Note also: Greenland and the Falklands suggest feasible hydrocarbon systems, but neither are proven. Its all about flow rates and reserve replacement.
To maintain reserve replacement and flow rates, we will need another two KSA sized provinces in the next two decades.
4. ”We have enough coal and can turn this into oil” . The Fischer Tropsche process is fine if: You are desperately finding ways to keep the Tigers moving after you have lost Ploesti to the Russians and the USAF has bombed your refineries flat, but it does not easily scale up and the EROEI is very poor. CTL technology is useful, but not entirely scaleable to meet flow rates.
5. ”Its all a big plot by government’ . Actually, nothing is further from the truth. Governments hate this subject being brought up. For years they have brushed it off and so too have government agencies , (USGS, IEA ) etc. There has been some modification of their stance since about 2005, but really, they would prefer you to look the other way .
– An aside: I often wondered if CAGW / CO2 curtailment policies were merely a tacit acknowledgment of PO…:-)
6. ‘Its all a plot by hippies and the greens’. Now this is where it gets seriously weired. If, during the nineties or early noughties, you were to get in to a discussion with any representatives of Greenpeace, FOE, WWF etc, they would flatly refuse to accept the possibility of PO as a concept. Why? – Not much mileage in a dead boogey man is there? If PO is real, then where will the CO2 come from. The green movement therefore has assumed unlimited access to Hydrocarbons so as to maintain the CO2 boogey man.
Overcoming PO is an operational management problem. A technical issue. I have always maintained Nuclear Power is the best way forward, but curiously, the greens have delayed this in my country and the US. It is the delays in the deployment of available, current technology that will hurt us in the medium term.
Rgds etc.

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hstad says:
November 9, 2010 at 1:41 pm
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That was exactly my point. The stuff we burn is a wast product from the refining process used to create the precursors for all that cool stuff you listed. If we stop burning petroleum based fuels, we will still be using petroleum at the current rate we are now. The only difference is that we will now have all this useless gasoline that we will still need to get rid of.

Dr chaos>
I’m skeptical although open-minded about abiotic oil. I really need to read some in-depth details to have a proper opinion. Whilst we’re just speculating, though:
“c) We are using a cubic mile of oil every year – so what volume of fossils was required to produce this? I know we have millions of years to work with, but still !”
I’m unconvinced by this argument. Imagine an ocean full of plankton, dropping out of the water to the seabed as it dies. It’ll accumulate in depressions and deeps. If you have just a thousand square miles of ocean, that cubic mile of oil represents a layer with the same dimensions as the ocean, and five feet thick. In fact, though, we have at least 100 million square miles of ocean, so even allowing for 100 years of oil extraction at the same rate, you’re talking a layer 5 thousandths of an inch thick, give or take.

The Russian references to abiotic oil are the best – the US work is derived from them.
There are some good articles – in English! http://www.scribd.com/doc/8226835/The-modern-theory-of-abiotic-genesis-of-hydrocarbons-Experimental-confirmation (From GFF (journal published by Geologiska Föreningen, Sweden) No. 126, pp 156-157: Abstract of speech by Vladimir G. Kutcherov 08.01.2004 at the 26th Nordic Geological Winter Meeting in Uppsala, Sweden
I understand that the petrified dinosaurs etc only go down to a certain level so that it is not possible that the very deep oil wells could come from petrified vegetation and dinosaurs. There is an anecdotal story that this explains the longevity of some of the Gulf of Mexico wells but I can’t vouch for this.
Apropos the reducing production of oil – in our little corner of the world, the consumption of oil as fuel has dropped significantly even tho’ the number of cars has risen significantly. This would suggest that cars are so much more efficient that less petrol is required. Just a thought.
And then, apparently there are a lot of hydrocarbons on Titan and I sure as blazes have never seen any dinosaurs and forests up there!
http://www.esa.int/esaSC/SEMCSUUHJCF_index_0.html

This is on target with my new book. It’s called “Everything you wanted to know about phobias but were afraid to ask”.

For the previous commenters, there is nothing that requires the carbon to be sourced by plants and animals. Inorganic carbon sources are also viable – in fact – it would appear that we might want to rethink the whole idea of organic vs. inorganic, at least where carbon is concerned. An example of an inorganic source for carbon would be sodium bicarbonate. Nature is sometimes kind.

Dr Chaos,
Unconventional also means “we didn’t know how to extract it from shale before.” It doesn’t necessarily mean abiotic. Deep wells, drilling through “basement rock”, that’s getting close to abiotic. Finding gas in fractured granite just a couple of miles above the moho, that’s probably abiotic.
We’ve got a lot to learn in a lot of areas.

Just looked up Hubbert on the wikipedia…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubbert_Peak_theory
and guess what you find under “See also”?
Limits to Growth (book)
I sense GM incoming in 3… 2… 1…

If one makes kerogen conversion from shale and oil sand illegal, illegalizes coal to liquid conversion, bans Arctic drilling, bans horizontal drilling with in-situ fracturing, and generally discourages oil exploration, then YES, the end can come quickly.
But only idiots and environmentalists would commit that kind of suicide.
Oh.. wait…

I have to post this again, if oil prices go up enough, other sources that can replace oil (biofuel for instance) become economical. Then less people want to buy oil since they sunk $600 into their car for the converter to use it or $50 for recent diesel engines. Most diesel engines older then 10 years can run on just about anything. This decreases demand…and the cycle continues until oil demand once again reaches a plateau and once again the cycle continues. Other sources of fuel can power vehicles and perform a number of things that oil does. The reason they generally do not is because they cost more.
Trust me, there is no peak oil emergency on the horizon. Just economic hurdles that we need to deal with in a sane fashion. Fear in itself is the issue…if we are afraid of everything that could go wrong, we live our lives from disaster to disaster. Its better to simply live life and enjoy it then worrying about “maybe possible problems”.

As a geologist who has explored for oil for the last 25 years, I think I can add some light to the subject. First of all, I subscribe to the statement that the “past is the key to future” and I believe that this applies to this debate. Many countries have already hit peak oil (http://www.theoildrum.com/node/5576) and there is absolutely no reason to think that the others won’t follow. We are all in awe of Saudi Arabia and other middle eastern countries but the fact is, we had a version of Saudi Arabia in West Texas and it finally peaked along with other great oil provenances in the U.S. and the world. My biggest eye opener was when I got to work Libya when it opened up a few years ago. I thought there would be some really big opportunities, but after exploring the country, I learned that, yes there are many opportunities but on a very small scale compared to the heydays of the 50’s where billion barrel discoveries were the norm.
As has been mentioned on other posts, there is a big difference between reserves found and flow rates. I do think there is a huge amount of reserves in oil sands, oil shales, etc. but it is very difficult to get large flow volumes from them. Peak oil is not about reserves but about how fast you can produce it. As I see it, the only way to reverse this is for prices to go up a lot to spur huge operations in extracting oil from shales, etc.
Finally, there is good evidence that peak oil of conventional crude already occured in 2004. Even with oil prices nearly tripling from that point, there was no uptick in conventional crude volumes.

Like the debate between CAGW alarmists and skeptics, the abiotic and biotic oil controversy continues.
here is one report:
http://www.viewzone.com/abioticoilx.html

Peak Oil – Yeah Right.
Here is a fine example of “experts” inability to accurately predict the future. The construction of an early calculator, the Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer was completed in 1946. It weighed in at approximately 30 tons, and used about 18,000 vacuum tubes.
About 1947 NewScientist said that in the future we may see calculators that use only 1,800 vacuum tubes and weigh as little as 3 tons.

A bunch of hogwash — we can make oil substitutes now, but they are expensive. When gets more expensive, oil substitutes from coal, algae, etc., will be relatively more affordable.
Plus, as oil becomes more expensive, more known oil reserves become available. In other words, we have known oil deposits that are too expensive to drill for. But they become economically viable when the price of oil goes up.
I’ll also second the notion that we have no clue what new technologies will or will not be available decades in the future.

Oil is abiotic — a product of chemical mineralogical formation.
How much oil exists? — No one knows.
How fast do these natural mineralogical processes take?
Again, no one knows.
But there are vast untapped sources of oil. Yes, much of it is in ultra-deep deposits in ultra-deep waters, below the seafloor, but it is there and it can be developed & produced.
In fact, some of these oil deposits are being developed & produced now.
Already, large deposits of deep sea oil are being produced.
More will come online for production & consumption.
So-called “peak” oil is over thirty years away, if then.
But “peak” oil within the next five years?
Not a snow ball’s chance in hell.

It’s still not certain that oil is an exhaustible fossil fuel, or is from a natural process in the mantle of the earth.
Freeman Dyson talks about it in the second half of this video:

In WWII, the USA bombed the german synthetic oil plants, making feul and lubricants from coal, this is a so well recognized a fact that it is impossible to cover up, however, it seems that people can forget it (some selectivly). If the germans could do it 65 years ago, is our technology today so backward and promitive that we can no longer do what they did so many decades ago? There is a LOT of coal, a lot more than oil. The only reason we do not make synthetic oil is that it is more expensive, and because our masters have chosen to “forget” any technology that actually works.
And that is just one of the currently available alternate feul technologies, there are also other ways to make synthetic feuls, plus space beamed solar power (about 5 times better than land based solar) which has been blocked by “environmentalists” on the thin excuse that it might maybe do something harmfull in some desert somewhere to something, and of course there is nuclear, and hydroelectric which is being attacked by “environmentalists” (despite it being “renewable”) as harmful to something somewhere.
And that is just a partial list of technologies we know we can build right now. The idea that alternatives do not exist is invented simply by reducing the list of alternatives to only those that do not currently work. It is also done by reducing the list to only those that are funded or otherwise under total control of our new masters. After, all, if “the government” is not in control of it, it must not be important, right?
The reason is simple, if we have limited feul, our masters can control us by rationing it, taxing it, regulating it, etc. They like that. If we have unlimited (effectivly) feul, they cannot. It is all about the revolt against the idea “that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights”. The new idea is that “some are more equel than others”. In other words, a return to the old idea that there are the nobles, and the peasants (thats you). In other words, a return to feudalism.
Welcome to the new dark ages, literally.

Some awfully silly ideas expressed above.
One character thinks that since oil production has leveled off in recent years this is proof that “peak oil” is here. As though the oil industry should be pumping unmarketable oil from the ground into endless storage capacity.
Another thinks that human industrial capacity is somehow maxed out and that we could never muster the wherewithal to increase infrastructure. As though China is going to soon quit manufacturing pipes and ships.
As many commentators above have noted, energy of many types is not only abundant but our technologies for producing them, especially oil and gas, are making them less costly to produce.
One important element has not been commented upon; the price of oil has been set by what the market will bear, not by an operational supply and demand relationship.
Over the decades oil pricing has shifted from administrative, to cartel influenced, to manufactured strategic glut, to manipulated speculative bubble.
The cost of current marginal production is well below the current market price of oil. This shows that production capacity is being withdrawn so as to maintain higher prices.
There simply is no energy “crisis” at all.
Here’s an economist’s take on the question:
The Recurring Myth of Peak Oil
http://alethonews.wordpress.com/2009/12/03/the-recurring-myth-of-peak-oil/

So it takes 90 years to start converting coal to oil?
Funny. The Germans did it in less than one.
Are we less capable technologically than Germany during WWII?
Did none of these “experts” and “professors” behind this “study” know about this?
Stuff like this makes me wish the college bubble would pop. I would like to see all college related government spending, assistance, and aid withdrawn. I would like to see the law changed so that all student loans past, present, and future could be discharged in bankruptcy. And I would like to see professors working at McDonald’s or standing in soup lines.
There is so much idiocy and wasted time and money in higher education that we could close half the schools and fire 3/4ths of the professors and the country would be better off.

stephen richards says: November 9, 2010 at 8:30 am
“and how many reports have we seen like this since the ’60s….”
Well Hubbert predicted US oil production would peak about 1970, that was a pretty good ‘guess’. No matter what you think the consequences of peak oil are, we are almost certainly near/on the production peak now. As pointed out even with new reserves being found there is a limit to how quick you can get it out. It is a lot easier to dig down a few metres in Texas than drill in miles of water in the Atlantic (EROEI again).

I’m 58 years old and my memory tells me that this peak oil theory has been banded about since I can remember. End of society had been predicted for 1970, then 1980, then 1990………
There are two types of people: The optimist and the pessimist. I bet it was the optimist ape that went down of the tree and started walking upright and I bet it was the optimist who went out of the cave and discovered the world. The optimists are always discovering things while the pessimists are watching fearfully, afraid of that explosion that may be caused by the unknown. Greenies are like that and worse. Having seen the optimist discover technology, they would want to destroy that technology to ‘save the planet’.
Someone once wrote: ‘The stone age era did not end because man ran out of stone’. Similarly, the oil era will not end because we would have run out of oil, coal or gas, but because we would have dicovered a CHEAPER WAY TO PRODUCE ENERGY.
Then there’s the biotic/abiotic oil discussion. I look at it this way: Carbon, in the form of CO2 gas, has been emanating from volcanoes/geological activity since before any life forms existed on or below the surface of this planet: THERE’S A LOT OF CARBON DOWN THERE. So why cannot carbon be coming out of the planet’s bowels under other chemical compounds? There’s a lot of pressure and temperature and humidity down in those depths that may be causing the right chemical reactions to produce hydrocarbons besides CO2. From where does the oxygen atoms that combine with the carbon one come from? And the hydrogen atom? Think about it. It’s simpler to conceive mentally than believing that all that oil and gas is a product of dead amoebas.

aletho says: November 9, 2010 at 9:08 pm
Why did the US decide to cut down what it produces 40 years ago while continuing to burn more oil?? You would have at least thought ‘big oil’ would have extracted more during the middle east oil embargoes of the 70’s.

IEA predicts possible peak oil for 2035 in their latest report.
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/7100
Could be another scare story, of course..

For second there I thought it said that they were predicting peau oil by studying investor patterns. Wait, not that IS what said.
So did they validate their model? Use it to hindcast the collapse of the tech bubble? The collapse of the Dutch tulip craze? How about the stock market crash of 1939? What? Hanson adjusted it based on temperature adjustments?
Well I suppose. There’s no reason you can’t replace studying actual reserves and actual consumption and actual efficiency programs with a chart from the DJIA. Why would you study something when you can study a prosy instead? Way cheaper, less work, and if it stops giving the information that supports your theory, you can just switch to something else. Don’t know what you would do with the left over data though. I’d suggest hiding it but those financial dudes keep retty close track of where their stuff is. I heard something about diggin a hole that they let you decline into, and just when you think it is a trick, it turns out it is just a clever way of burying you in cement. Then again, they might want to investigate this technicque the climate dudes have of adjusting number downward in the past. My work for investors too.

@Ben W
got here too late to read the bulk of the thread…but thanks for the link http://www.gasresources.net/
This is more like my field and I really appreciated some of the very elegant papers on that site. I can’t refute them with my own knowledge and experience. The opposition seems quite mute really. Then again I haven’t had time to read the whole thread – pressure of work! Lol!

The problem with studies like this is they only take into account what is today, and have a devil of a time figuring out what will be. The people doing the study can only work with what they know, but going out decades or centuries what they don’t know will, inevitably, be a much bigger factor than what they know now.
What will be the next breakthrough? Super-efficient solar? Algae? Fusion? Do the authors of the study really claim to know, and know when? “Hubris” is the word I’m looking for.

Well spotted Anthony, that prediction goes to the opposite extreme to some of the greenies. You can’t use the stock market to forecast like that. The stock goes up after that idiot Ben Bernanke speaks. The market is good at dealing with some mid term capital demand fluctuations but that’s all its good for. Long term oil projections are based on those who don’t understand the alternatives. Short term fluctuations are always quick fools taking money from slower fools.
Most of the best alternative energy projects are privately traded and so don’t show up. To work they need finance at the share issue: random trading of the stocks a year later is irrelevant. The current banking crisis has that messed up borrowing but not ventia capital. One shot in the straights of Hormuz and millions will poor back into biofuels and the solar hydrogen economy.
All most all the technical barriers to solar hydrogen are now gone. We have very good hydrides and carbon based storage, so expensive and dangerous liquid hydrogen is not needed. Honda is selling a home hydrogen system for fuelling the car.
solar and wind need 16% storage. We have many basic storage systems blocked by cap and trade. The cap and trade stands in the way Governments wont price power with hourly demand making buy low and sell high electricity storage viable. Grid Storage companies don’t get certificates to trade.
I know of dozens of projects that will be competitive with oil and coal in 5 to 10 years. If we get rid of the subsidies then the solar and wind capital will go to the technology that can be as cheap as oil and coal not to the stuff that’s “almost ready some of the time”. If the financial crisis is still going by then forget energy prices; you’ll be burning barrow loads of dollars but there wont be anything left to cook.

Much has already been said, but as an investment advisor the above extrapolation seems an overreach. I would agree that a plurality of investor sentiment is as good as any because you get a large number of people voting with something that’s important to them, their money. But I can’t get how you extrapolate that 90 years into the future.
Try to extrapolate Apple Computer’s value 20 years ago based on some model how many Mackintosh or personal computers there will be. If you don’t know what a Mackintosh is, it’s a computer that’s made by the same company that makes IPods and IPhones and IPads. The companies value is also a judgement of Steve Jobs ability to adapt and evolve. Wells Fargo didn’t go out of business when the world stopped using Stagecoaches.
Leaning a little closer to the energy industry, it’s a good bet that GE could be profiting from LED lights, or whatever comes after that, long after Thomas Edison’s Incandescent lights only exist in a museum.
Because of Edison, Proctor and Gamble dropped Candles from their core business and focused on its other core product Soap.
Another problem is that future values far into the future have much less value nearer term future values. For example, what if I told you that you could have $1 million today or $10 million in 5 years. I suspect many would wait five years and rack up those credit cards in the interim. Now what if I told you, you could have a $1 million now or a $100 billion dollars 100 years from now. How many people would actually do the math on that one before they figured out that there kids would be dead before the money came. The current share price of a stock has much more to do with what the company is doing now and in the next five years let alone 20 or 90 years into the future.
Oil Co’s have been rebranding themselves as Energy Co’s. As alternative comes along that can displace oil they’ll switch their tremendous resources of capital, production and brain power to that. That’s just not the case yet and likely will not be for another 20-50 years or more.

Kirk W. Hanneman says:
The problem with studies like this is they only take into account what is today, and have a devil of a time figuring out what will be. The people doing the study can only work with what they know, but going out decades or centuries what they don’t know will, inevitably, be a much bigger factor than what they know now.

Yeah, the inherent unpredictability of the future.
Some people usually counter, “but that’s no excuse not to use what we know”.
Well, as you say, we know that the future unknowns are the far bigger factor. So let’s use that. Let’s imagine scenarios, imagine what if, but not treat any of it as if it is real.

My Lord! Saying that investors and brokers can predict future events 100 years from now is even worse than saying that paleo scientists can predict the climate in the same span of time! Then these people grab this investment nonsense and tie to what? To how much oil is left? Please forgive them for they are ignorant of their sins……..

I recall way back when I was about to graduate with a BS in ChE: I was advised to stay out of the O&G business, as there was only fifty years of oil left in the ground. Lemme see: that was back in 1952, so we must have pumped dry eight years ago.
Cassandras have always been around. And wrong.

From Kum Dollison on November 9, 2010 at 11:10 pm:

1) Oil hit $147.00/barrel in 2008, and crashed the global economy.

Actually the crash came from underlying weaknesses. Didn’t you hear about the mortgage crisis? People with marginal finances got homes. Then gasoline prices rocketed up. Those who drove long commutes were hit hard. A few were actually losing money by keeping a job (figuring in day care expenses along with transportation, etc). More figured out they’d have more money on hand collecting unemployment and staying home, I heard of a few who volunteered to be laid off first. Then there were the higher home energy costs. Mortgages didn’t get paid, foreclosures went up… And the housing bubble didn’t burst, it exploded, as it was formed from the smelly gas coming from a rotting mass that shouldn’t have been allowed to form from the start.
And with the mortgage crisis, plus other exposed weaknesses, the US economy went down, the world economies went down as demand collapsed, etc.
The oil prices triggered it, but it was inevitable it would have happened sometime. Before it blew up, analysts were saying the market could bear the higher prices, and we were headed to $4 a gallon gas and $200 a barrel crude looked possible to likely.
Meanwhile, assorted Green activists and politicians were (and still are?) pointing to how well US drivers bore those higher prices for so long as proof we can withstand a $1 a gallon tax to fund Green projects and more social spending while reducing consumption to reduce carbon emissions….

2) We don’t have any more oil now than we had then.

In the ground, we actually have less since we’ve been pumping it out. But we have discovered more of it, drilled more wells, done more research on extracting it from pump-able and non-pump-able sources (shale, tar sands etc). We’re making it from coal and other sources (Fischer-Tropsch etc).
In real terms of the amount of oil available to us for immediate use, we have more now than we did fifty years ago, may have more in the future than we do now, might even have more now than we did in 2008.
Less in the ground, sure. But as technology moves on, we may end up “creating” more oil and oil products than was ever in the ground. It’s possible, and getting more possible all the time.

The fact is: oil has, basically, doubled in price since 2005, and we can’t pump a drop more now than we could then.
The DOD “Joint Operations Environment” Report says we’re in deep doo-doo. The German Military says the same. Both the EIA, and the IEA state that the only way we can keep production at current levels is by utilizing “Undiscovered” Fields. “Undiscovered!”
It takes Years from “discovery” to “Pumping.” We know what’s coming in the next few years. Not enough.
Take “Reserves” with a grain of salt. It was 1989, I think, that OPEC decided to base “quotas” on “proven reserves.” Within two years all OPEC Nations had “Doubled” their “proven” reserves.
Last month the USGS lowered its estimate of “proven” reserves in the National Petroleum Reserve – Alaska from 10 Billion Barrels to 1 Billion Barrels. A -90% revision.

http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2010/1108/opinions-steve-forbes-fact-comment-energy-crisis-over.html

“As a result, market forecasts of future events, representing consensus predictions of a large number of investors, tend to be relatively accurate.”
I’m an investor. This is not true beyond roughly six month. And even to six month it is dicey. If you think that it is true, take your money and buy stocks according to the consensus predictions. If you are right, you’ll make far more money that way than you will writing papers at UC Davis. Do you know why Warren Buffett buys Coke and Sees Candy instead of high tech. Because high tech is too hard to understand, making it too hard to predict.

This is for the “OMG we’re running out of hydrocarbon energy!” mob:
From: The Times November 10, 2010
Robin Pagnamenta, Energy Editor
GLOBAL GAS GLUT COULD THREATEN ALTERNATIVE POWER RESOURCES
A glut in global supplies of natural gas over the next decade threatens to blunt investment in alternative sources of energy including wind, nuclear and solar power, the International Energy Agency said yesterday.
Speaking at the launch of the IEA’s annual World Energy Outlook report, Fatih Birol, its chief economist, said that the world was entering a “golden age of gas” because of surging production of shale gas using new technology developed in the United States. He said that the IEA, the Paris-based agency that advises the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development on oil and energy issues, was now predicting a global surplus of the fuel of about 150 billion cubic metres annually in the years ahead.
That’s equivalent to nearly double Britain’s annual gas consumption of 86 billion cubic metres, or 5% of world demand – 2,940 billion cubic metres.