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> Peak Oil [...] Everything they said was true. I feel even some of the premises were wrong: The root idea is obviously correct: "finite reservoir means finite
by creer 1y ago
> Peak Oil [...] Everything they said was true.
I feel even some of the premises were wrong: The root idea is obviously correct: "finite reservoir means finite oil, means peaky exploitation curve" - nothing earth-shattering there. But it seems to be there was an assumption that the next oil is technically more difficult to reach than the previous oil. And that's not even true. In the case of fracking, once understood, fracking was not exactly difficult or expensive.
"Next oil is more difficult than previous oil" was, still is, an incorrect assumption. It feels obvious for current production simply because economically it makes sense to exploit cheaper oil first. But even that is not true because politically it makes sense to reserve safer oil for later. And longer term, unknown oil may be simpler: probably unknown-tech oil but maybe simply undiscovered oil.
- marcus_holmes 1y agoYeah, as it turns out fracking wasn't that difficult. But it took the industry some effort to find that out, effort that it didn't want to spend until it had to. The same may be true for a whole bunch of things - we don't do them now because that's not how we do things, and it'll take some effort and risk to try a new way. We have a local optimum that we're happy with until the environment changes and we have to discover another one. So possibly the assumption wasn't even "next oil is more difficult" but just "current oil is good enough". If you're making vast bank with the current process, why change? Which is the thing with growth collapsing. What works now won't work in the future, but that doesn't mean that nothing works in the future. There might be better ways of running an economy as we stop relying on growth to make everything work.