M. King Meets the EIA

Fracking is invigorating the US economy by providing abundant, relatively cheap, energy. While not inexhaustible, tracked gas and oil resources in the US will last for centuries and has the strategic benefit of no longer needing to kowtow to the demands and blackmail of those who live in the lands of sand and camels.
Fracking is the economic vaccine, or antidote, to goofy alarmist policies.
So America has shown the way. Fracking is hugely beneficial and the nonsense alarmist claims of associated earthquakes and groundwater pollution have been demonstrated to be be grossly exaggerated.
So now let’s turn to Europe and its geriatric approach to anything which makes economic and environmental sense, it has decided to heed the voices of the ecoloons and make the lives of those who wish to provide cheap and reliable energy, through fracking, as difficult as possible.
So Europe will continue its decline as it smugly watches a resurgent America, happy to strut its supposedly green credentials and tut tutting about how much wiser it is for the planet to depend on unreliable expensive wind power than cheap, reliable oil and gas from fracking. Most (not all) European countries have huge untapped resources of oil and gas shales.
It is no coincidence that those people who oppose fracking and cheap reliable energy are the same as those who support expensive unreliable wind energy. Americans rightly complain about the ecoloon policies of its EPA , but these are relatively benign compared to those of the European Union.
So America, it will not be long before Europe comes cap in hand to you seeking the equivalent of a new Marshall Aid Plan.

Simon’s name is the one to mention here – as it has been further up, for all that the miserabilists tried to brush it out of history.
I think we are approaching resource shortage from the wrong angle. As was also mentioned earlier, we currently know that hydrocarbon liquids are a good way to store portable energy. Therefore, so long as we use hydrocarbon-powered vehicles, for instance, we will need to produce hydrocarbons. And we will.
We will dig them from the ground using surface seepage, deep wells or fracking. We will get them from under the sea and ice. We will reconstitute them from coal, plastics and individual atoms if we have to. The driving force is not the existence of current reservoirs that we know how to exploit – it’s our need for them.
And when that need diminishes – perhaps we invent teleportation or something, or invent an even better way of storing portable energy – THEN the production will fall to minimal amounts. It is the need for an item, NOT the current method of obtaining it, which drives an item’s existence….

perhaps we invent teleportation or something
We are well on the way to that effect wit Skype. Telepresence will complete the function.

michel:
In your post at January 12, 2014 at 12:52 am you assert

Hubbert’s argument was that for a given type of extractive industry, there is a typical curve. What happens is that reserves are found, and extraction proceeds apace, however the industry then starts to find diminishing returns and so we go over the peak and it falls.
Its quite unlike other economic phenomena, for instance the experience curve in manufacturing.
Hubbert would probably argue that exactly the same pattern will follow with natural gas, extracted through fracking or whatever.
To argue the contrary you’d have to argue that reserves are essentially unlimited. Its a possible argument, but it seems a bit unlikely. If you look at the great finds, for instance North Sea, or Saudi, their production does seem to follow Hubbert’s curve. So for instance did UK coal. So probably did South American copper, don’t know the stats.

And that is your error.
For all practical purposes any resource can be considered to be infinite.
I recently explained this in another WUWT thread where my explanation used the effectively infinite availability of crude oil as illustration. The explanation concludes saying

The Malthusian idea is wrong because it ignores basic economics and applies a wrong model; human population is NOT constrained by resources like the population of bacteria in a Petri dish.

This link is to that explanation.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/01/05/overpopulation-the-fallacy-behind-the-fallacy-of-global-warming/#comment-1526318
Richard

Once a practical battery comes to market, ,most demand for crude disappears. Nuclear can provide all the energy the world will ever need,and for millions of years (the oceans are full of uranium) and fast reactors can extract 40 times more energy from uranium than current reactors –
the energy that still remains in our nuclear waste is enough to provide all the energy this country needs for the next 1000 years. When you move into advanced nuclear power, there is no practical limit on energy resources – they will last as long as our sun. I have to laugh when folks get concerned about “finite energy resources.” Finite coal, oil, etc, yes, but not finite energy.
As for gasoline being a “concentrated energy source,” I disagree. Electricity has no mass or weight and thus is the most concentrated energy source available. It’s only the storage batteries that have weight in an electric car. But that weight has come down drastically over the years and continues to do so. And gas powered cars require lots of heavy (and complicated) machinery to
extract and convert energy from gasoline that electric cars do not require. An electric car is intrinsically more reliable, simple, and will be less expensive once battery costs are conquered.

Adherents of the various “peak” production theories claim the fact that production actually decreases at some point validates their theory. I say the key distinction is whether we can’t produce any more, or simply that we don’t need to. We reached “peak whale oil” sometime in the 19th century and production has dropped to essentially zero today, but we still have lights and all our machinery is still lubricated.