Peak Oil, in the very narrow sense of there being a point of maximum oil production before it starts declining as what remains becomes harder and thereby more e

Peak Oil, in the very narrow sense of there being a point of maximum oil production before it starts declining as what remains becomes harder and thereby more expensive to extract, will probably happen eventually. The broader hypothesized 'Peak Oil' phenomenon wherein the decline in oil production causes enormous societal upheaval and possibly the collapse of industrial civilization will almost certainly not happen, because as it turns out the reserves of relatively easy to extract oil are pretty large, plus a large amount of additional reserves (shale, tar sands, etc) become economical to extract at a relatively small increase in price. Add in the fact that electric cars will probably do away with most of the market for oil over the next couple of decades, and it's likely that, by the time we run out of oil, it will have been used only as an input for various industrial processes for a couple of centuries. And of course, this was the same argument used against the 'Peak Oil' idea when it was a big thing, it's just come into better focus with the passage of time.