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Again? 1882: "only 95 Million barrels remaining/4 years of oil left" 1919: "only 20 years of oil left" 1950: "only 100 Billion barrels left" 1956: "peak oil

Again? 1882: "only 95 Million barrels remaining/4 years of oil left" 1919: "only 20 years of oil left" 1950: "only 100 Billion barrels left" 1956: "peak oil" by 1970 1980: "only 648 Billion barrels left" 1993: "only 999 Billion barrels left" 2000: "only 1016 Billion barrels left" 2008: "only 1238 Billion barrels left" The point is not the peak oil will never happen, it's that we have no clue when it will. Past precedent says prices will rise slightly, technology will improve, and new oil that was once too expensive to obtain becomes obtainable. Here's my prediction: We will switch to some cheaper alternative long before oil ever runs out. There won't be some dramatic crisis where everything goes to shit. It will be a gradual change where oil prices steadily climb and consumption slowly diminishes. Just like has already happened with countless other resources and just like is happening now. Source and video explanation [Are we running out of Resources?]: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AcWkN4ngR2Y http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AcWkN4ngR2Y

coldtea 13y ago
>Past precedent says prices will rise slightly, technology will improve, and new oil that was once too expensive to obtain becomes obtainable. And common logic says that a resource that is finish will, sooner or later, finish. It also says that there's no natural law that "technology will improve" always, so that getting harder to get oil will only require the prices to rise "slightly". At some point a specific technology does not improve anymore, or you get diminishing returns. Also, common sense says, that as time goes by, and measurements improve, it's far more likely for us to predict correctly how many barrels are left that it was in the past. Common sense says that for a civilisation to run out of a resource and NOT find a proper, similarly cheap, replacement in due time, it's bloody probable. Nothing strange about it. Now, some people like to think that stuff like "technology always improves in time to save us" is some kind of natural law. I guess they are more into science as religion, than in science as science.
- CamperBob2 13y ago
  Now, some people like to think that stuff like "technology always improves in time to save us" is some kind of natural law. I guess they are more into science as religion, than in science as science. (Shrug) On the one side, we have some people who have always said that. They have always been right. On the other side, we have some people who have always forecast an imminent heat death of Malthusian malaise for us all. Those people have never been right, so I'd say they bear the burden of proof that This Time It's Different.
  - SideburnsOfDoom 13y ago
    Stein's Law: If something cannot go on forever, it will stop. The only thing that's guaranteed when consuming a finite resource at an accelerating rate is that sooner or later, It Will Be Different.
    - CamperBob2 13y ago
      But being right at the wrong time is no better, and often worse, than being flat-out wrong.
      - caoilte 13y ago
        Sometimes being right at the wrong time is better. Maybe we are only alive today because so many of our parents predicted Nuclear Armageddon and acted to prevent it? It always depends. Every situation is different and it always boils down to a risk assessment. We have to make a collective call on whether the risks of doing nothing outweigh the benefits. Unfortunately we can't rely on our current obsession: "the markets" to make an accurate risk assessment for us. Markets and oligarchies (and darwinism for that matter) operate within established patterns. They optimize and specialise for short term success. It takes external pressures to implement transformative change. That external pressure will either be uncomfortably "communist" or the "creative destruction" of a global bloodletting that destroys most of our ecosystems.
      - SideburnsOfDoom 13y ago
        Worse for what? If you're gambling on the stock market then sure it's worse for you. If you're wanting to keep civilisation functioning well, then no; taking precautions is not worse for us.
        CamperBob2 13y ago
        taking precautions is not worse for us. Are you naive enough to assume that all effects of "precautions" are necessarily benign?
- Houshalter 13y ago
  >It also says that there's no natural law that "technology will improve" always, so that getting harder to get oil will only require the prices to rise "slightly". At some point a specific technology does not improve anymore, or you get diminishing returns. If you (or anyone) actually believed that you'd be going out and buying oil and oil rights, expecting to get rich off the massive price increase you are predicting. If people did that it wouldn't be a problem in the first place (it would conserve oil from the present supply for future demand, stabilizing the price.)
  - baq 13y ago
    you assume rational markets. this assumption doesn't hold in the real world. that's regardless of the fact that most of humans on this planet don't have the money to buy oil or oil rights, and of those that do, most aren't interested. PS financial institutions already do that.
    - Houshalter 13y ago
      I'm not assuming anything, merely pointing out an easy way to get rich (if you are truly confident that your prediction is correct.) But I do believe that markets are more rational than you are giving them credit for, and that the reason oil isn't being conserved even more is that no one actually believes that and is willing to bet their money on it.
      - baq 13y ago
        disagree. the reason oil isn't being conserved is that it's too cheap. the only cost in the price of oil is extraction cost and sometimes maybe some tax; depends who's paying. cost of pollution and oil replacement research? probably 'optimized' out.
  - BrokenPipe 13y ago
    Isn't that already the case? Isn't this "present supply vs future demand" already part of the pricing that makes oil ?
- reissbaker 13y ago
  And common logic says that a resource that is finish will, sooner or later, finish. Sooner or later — well, you're probably right, for some definition of "later." But the only reason people burn oil is because it's a cheap source of energy. As supply diminishes relative to demand, price will increase, but then it won't be a source of cheap energy anymore: it'll be an expensive one, and electric will take over. (Let's ignore, for the sake of argument, the fact that oil isn't finite and can be produced in a lab from organic materials, albeit expensively; we can also ignore that oil will naturally form over millions of years from decomposing plant and animal materials, since that's largely irrelevant to humanity as we know it.) Eventually, even as oil supply diminishes and prices go up, even as people switch away to electricity, someone somewhere will still have a need to consume oil. Years after it's barely useful anymore, even though battery tech has gotten so good it surpasses the internal combustion engine dollar for dollar even ignoring the tax credits, there'll be a lab buried away still burning it for something. And finally, some day, the last drop — or at least, the last easily-recoverable natural drop – of oil will be burned. But, to be honest, it won't really matter. The scariest energy-related crisis facing us in the foreseeable future isn't the inability to burn oil or other cheap but dirty energy sources: it's the ease with which everyone currently does burn them, slowly but surely smothering, melting, and then freezing the planet. I hope the BP geologist is right; I'd rather face peak oil than an ice age.
  - pacala 13y ago
    "electric" is not a source of energy. Is a way to transport energy. No oil / fossil fuels => no cheap electricity either.
- raphinou 13y ago
  Your remark about finite resources made think about this video about the exponential funtion:http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=F-QA2rkpBSY&desktop_uri=%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DF-QA2rkpBSY http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=F-QA2rkpBSY&desktop_uri=%2Fwatc...
- rahimnathwani 13y ago
  > Now, some people like to think that stuff like "technology always improves in time to save us" is some kind of natural law. Survivorship bias. If it hadn't worked that way in the past, we wouldn't be here talking about it :)
  - coldtea 13y ago
    Well, most people forget that it has NOT worked that way in the past -- only they weren't here to talk about it, their grandfathers were (and barely made it), or other counties were.
- forgottenpaswrd 13y ago
  "Now, some people like to think that stuff like "technology always improves in time to save us" is some kind of natural law. I guess they are more into science as religion, than in science as science." That is because IT IS a natural law. If this law were not true, then there would be no humans on earth. It it scientific because there is evidence with real data to prove the hypothesis. The fact is that humans are not only resource consumers but also resource creators. It is you who misled science as science for "religion of the Doomsday". Science tells us that there is trillions of billions of stars, each carrying trillions of times more energy that we consume.
  - makomk 13y ago
    Actually, that's a good reason why we don't have evidence to prove that hypothesis. We're only seeing the trials that worked, because if science didn't improve in time to save us we wouldn't still be here to observe it. For all we know, there have been billions of civilizations out there that have thought the same and died out, but by the very nature of the problem we can only observe the successes.
krapp 13y ago
>Past precedent says prices will rise slightly, technology will improve, and new oil that was once too expensive to obtain becomes obtainable. And yet, even if all that is true, oil is still a finite resource being consumed with ever increasing demand. The only thing this proves, if it proves anything, is that we're terrible at accurately stating the terms of the problem, not that there won't ever be a problem.
- randyrand 13y ago
  >And yet, even if all that is true, oil is still a finite resource being consumed with ever increasing demand. That can't be said for certain: http://www.wired.com/autopia/2008/05/making-renewabl/ http://www.wired.com/autopia/2008/05/making-renewabl/ But yes, I agree with you. If oil is for some reason impossible to produce synthetically then there will without question have to come a time when we need to switch to an alternative. I think that switch will happen naturally without the need for government intervention, though. Even without a synthetic alternative I think that switch will happen sooner rather than later.
  - SideburnsOfDoom 13y ago
    I don't think that biofuel counts as "oil" for the purposes of this discussion. it's not a fossil fuel that gets dug up. It's a renewable, carbon-neutral storage of solar power, really.
    - radiorental 13y ago
      Renewable possibly. Sustainable & carbon neutral, definitely not. https://www.google.com/search?q=is+biofuel+carbon+neutral https://www.google.com/search?q=is+biofuel+carbon+neutral It's heavily subsidized, pushes food prices up, causes deforestation and requires more energy to produce than it produces. It's a short term hack that exists because it fits in to the current energy systems, not a longterm solution. It certainly does constitute as 'oil' for the purposes of this discussion.
  - waps 13y ago
skannamalai 13y ago
The article actually concedes we're discovering "more barrels of oil." It's just that oil is harder and harder to get at from a production standpoint (retrieval, supply chain, finishing, etc). Just because the carbon is there doesn't mean we haven't already eaten all the easy stuff and so his premise is that the remaining fossil fuels (while possibly plentiful) are still really ugly from a cost perspective, driving up energy costs to the point where it alters economies. Which makes sense when you figure the cost of off-shore drilling or fracking or whatever vs sticking a tube in the ground in Texas or what have you.
caoilte 13y ago
His point is that our economies didn't cope well with the previous "gradual" price rise and that we can expect further "gradual" price rises in the next decade and that most economies will not cope well once more. You may not personally have been affected by the previous price rise, but in the developing world and for people already living below the poverty line these price rises will trigger more riots, revolutions, mass emigrations and resource wars. And then there's fertilizers...
notastartup 13y ago
It's like we hit a new "peak" every 4 or 6 years with an imminent apocalypse on the other end of it. I just don't see Saudi Kings panicking in their castles built by below minimum wage workers so they must have a lot of it but need to justify price increases in the future because "we are running out and need more US dollar for it"
- rett12 13y ago
  "My father rode a camel. I drive a car. My son flies a jet airplane. His son will ride a camel." Anonymous Saudi Sheik – 1982
  - notastartup 13y ago
    A camel that drives the car with biochips infused in it's brain!
  - baq 13y ago
    not anonymous and i'm not sure if the date is right. upvoted anyway. see also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rashid_bin_Saeed_Al_Maktoum#Development_of_Dubai http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rashid_bin_Saeed_Al_Maktoum#Dev...
dragonwriter 13y ago
Peak oil has nothing to do with how many barrels of oil are "left". Peak oil is about production rates. And the 1956 prediction of a peak around 1970 wasn't a prediction of a global peak, it was a prediction of a US peak -- which occurred just as predicted.
- kirchhoff 13y ago
  Except that US crude oil production is now rising. http://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=PET&s=MCRFPUS1&f=M http://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=PET&s=MC...
  - mithras 13y ago
    Irrelevant when global production is declining.
    - BrokenPipe 13y ago
      Relevant when peak oil was just US.
  - glaurent 13y ago
    but it's still below the levels of 1970.
  - dragonwriter 13y ago
    > Except that US crude oil production is now rising. Its been rising for a while, but still way below the peak in 1970. The behavior observed is not at all inconsistent with the prediction.
PavlovsCat 13y ago
I wonder if there are networks of "think" tanks coming up with reasons to "stay the course" with our dependance on fossil fuels, similar to the one pushing global warming denial just recently exposed. > Here's my prediction: We will switch to some cheaper alternative long before oil ever runs out. But that's the thing, cheapness, or infinite availability, or both.. this threatens existing profits. Greater global good but less personal profit = not good enough. Hence my wondering about the existence of "advertising budgets" for steering away from that.

coldtea 13y ago

>Past precedent says prices will rise slightly, technology will improve, and new oil that was once too expensive to obtain becomes obtainable. And common logic says that a resource that is finish will, sooner or later, finish. It also says that there's no natural law that "technology will improve" always, so that getting harder to get oil will only require the prices to rise "slightly". At some point a specific technology does not improve anymore, or you get diminishing returns. Also, common sense says, that as time goes by, and measurements improve, it's far more likely for us to predict correctly how many barrels are left that it was in the past. Common sense says that for a civilisation to run out of a resource and NOT find a proper, similarly cheap, replacement in due time, it's bloody probable. Nothing strange about it. Now, some people like to think that stuff like "technology always improves in time to save us" is some kind of natural law. I guess they are more into science as religion, than in science as science.

CamperBob2 13y ago
Now, some people like to think that stuff like "technology always improves in time to save us" is some kind of natural law. I guess they are more into science as religion, than in science as science. (Shrug) On the one side, we have some people who have always said that. They have always been right. On the other side, we have some people who have always forecast an imminent heat death of Malthusian malaise for us all. Those people have never been right, so I'd say they bear the burden of proof that This Time It's Different.
- SideburnsOfDoom 13y ago
  Stein's Law: If something cannot go on forever, it will stop. The only thing that's guaranteed when consuming a finite resource at an accelerating rate is that sooner or later, It Will Be Different.
  - CamperBob2 13y ago
    But being right at the wrong time is no better, and often worse, than being flat-out wrong.
    - caoilte 13y ago
      Sometimes being right at the wrong time is better. Maybe we are only alive today because so many of our parents predicted Nuclear Armageddon and acted to prevent it? It always depends. Every situation is different and it always boils down to a risk assessment. We have to make a collective call on whether the risks of doing nothing outweigh the benefits. Unfortunately we can't rely on our current obsession: "the markets" to make an accurate risk assessment for us. Markets and oligarchies (and darwinism for that matter) operate within established patterns. They optimize and specialise for short term success. It takes external pressures to implement transformative change. That external pressure will either be uncomfortably "communist" or the "creative destruction" of a global bloodletting that destroys most of our ecosystems.
    - SideburnsOfDoom 13y ago
      Worse for what? If you're gambling on the stock market then sure it's worse for you. If you're wanting to keep civilisation functioning well, then no; taking precautions is not worse for us.
      - CamperBob2 13y ago
        taking precautions is not worse for us. Are you naive enough to assume that all effects of "precautions" are necessarily benign?
Houshalter 13y ago
>It also says that there's no natural law that "technology will improve" always, so that getting harder to get oil will only require the prices to rise "slightly". At some point a specific technology does not improve anymore, or you get diminishing returns. If you (or anyone) actually believed that you'd be going out and buying oil and oil rights, expecting to get rich off the massive price increase you are predicting. If people did that it wouldn't be a problem in the first place (it would conserve oil from the present supply for future demand, stabilizing the price.)
- baq 13y ago
  you assume rational markets. this assumption doesn't hold in the real world. that's regardless of the fact that most of humans on this planet don't have the money to buy oil or oil rights, and of those that do, most aren't interested. PS financial institutions already do that.
  - Houshalter 13y ago
    I'm not assuming anything, merely pointing out an easy way to get rich (if you are truly confident that your prediction is correct.) But I do believe that markets are more rational than you are giving them credit for, and that the reason oil isn't being conserved even more is that no one actually believes that and is willing to bet their money on it.
    - baq 13y ago
      disagree. the reason oil isn't being conserved is that it's too cheap. the only cost in the price of oil is extraction cost and sometimes maybe some tax; depends who's paying. cost of pollution and oil replacement research? probably 'optimized' out.
- BrokenPipe 13y ago
  Isn't that already the case? Isn't this "present supply vs future demand" already part of the pricing that makes oil ?
reissbaker 13y ago
And common logic says that a resource that is finish will, sooner or later, finish. Sooner or later — well, you're probably right, for some definition of "later." But the only reason people burn oil is because it's a cheap source of energy. As supply diminishes relative to demand, price will increase, but then it won't be a source of cheap energy anymore: it'll be an expensive one, and electric will take over. (Let's ignore, for the sake of argument, the fact that oil isn't finite and can be produced in a lab from organic materials, albeit expensively; we can also ignore that oil will naturally form over millions of years from decomposing plant and animal materials, since that's largely irrelevant to humanity as we know it.) Eventually, even as oil supply diminishes and prices go up, even as people switch away to electricity, someone somewhere will still have a need to consume oil. Years after it's barely useful anymore, even though battery tech has gotten so good it surpasses the internal combustion engine dollar for dollar even ignoring the tax credits, there'll be a lab buried away still burning it for something. And finally, some day, the last drop — or at least, the last easily-recoverable natural drop – of oil will be burned. But, to be honest, it won't really matter. The scariest energy-related crisis facing us in the foreseeable future isn't the inability to burn oil or other cheap but dirty energy sources: it's the ease with which everyone currently does burn them, slowly but surely smothering, melting, and then freezing the planet. I hope the BP geologist is right; I'd rather face peak oil than an ice age.
- pacala 13y ago
  "electric" is not a source of energy. Is a way to transport energy. No oil / fossil fuels => no cheap electricity either.
raphinou 13y ago
Your remark about finite resources made think about this video about the exponential funtion:http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=F-QA2rkpBSY&desktop_uri=%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DF-QA2rkpBSY http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=F-QA2rkpBSY&desktop_uri=%2Fwatc...
rahimnathwani 13y ago
> Now, some people like to think that stuff like "technology always improves in time to save us" is some kind of natural law. Survivorship bias. If it hadn't worked that way in the past, we wouldn't be here talking about it :)
- coldtea 13y ago
  Well, most people forget that it has NOT worked that way in the past -- only they weren't here to talk about it, their grandfathers were (and barely made it), or other counties were.
forgottenpaswrd 13y ago
"Now, some people like to think that stuff like "technology always improves in time to save us" is some kind of natural law. I guess they are more into science as religion, than in science as science." That is because IT IS a natural law. If this law were not true, then there would be no humans on earth. It it scientific because there is evidence with real data to prove the hypothesis. The fact is that humans are not only resource consumers but also resource creators. It is you who misled science as science for "religion of the Doomsday". Science tells us that there is trillions of billions of stars, each carrying trillions of times more energy that we consume.
- makomk 13y ago
  Actually, that's a good reason why we don't have evidence to prove that hypothesis. We're only seeing the trials that worked, because if science didn't improve in time to save us we wouldn't still be here to observe it. For all we know, there have been billions of civilizations out there that have thought the same and died out, but by the very nature of the problem we can only observe the successes.

krapp 13y ago

>Past precedent says prices will rise slightly, technology will improve, and new oil that was once too expensive to obtain becomes obtainable. And yet, even if all that is true, oil is still a finite resource being consumed with ever increasing demand. The only thing this proves, if it proves anything, is that we're terrible at accurately stating the terms of the problem, not that there won't ever be a problem.

randyrand 13y ago
>And yet, even if all that is true, oil is still a finite resource being consumed with ever increasing demand. That can't be said for certain: http://www.wired.com/autopia/2008/05/making-renewabl/ http://www.wired.com/autopia/2008/05/making-renewabl/ But yes, I agree with you. If oil is for some reason impossible to produce synthetically then there will without question have to come a time when we need to switch to an alternative. I think that switch will happen naturally without the need for government intervention, though. Even without a synthetic alternative I think that switch will happen sooner rather than later.
- SideburnsOfDoom 13y ago
  I don't think that biofuel counts as "oil" for the purposes of this discussion. it's not a fossil fuel that gets dug up. It's a renewable, carbon-neutral storage of solar power, really.
  - radiorental 13y ago
    Renewable possibly. Sustainable & carbon neutral, definitely not. https://www.google.com/search?q=is+biofuel+carbon+neutral https://www.google.com/search?q=is+biofuel+carbon+neutral It's heavily subsidized, pushes food prices up, causes deforestation and requires more energy to produce than it produces. It's a short term hack that exists because it fits in to the current energy systems, not a longterm solution. It certainly does constitute as 'oil' for the purposes of this discussion.
- waps 13y ago

skannamalai 13y ago

The article actually concedes we're discovering "more barrels of oil." It's just that oil is harder and harder to get at from a production standpoint (retrieval, supply chain, finishing, etc). Just because the carbon is there doesn't mean we haven't already eaten all the easy stuff and so his premise is that the remaining fossil fuels (while possibly plentiful) are still really ugly from a cost perspective, driving up energy costs to the point where it alters economies. Which makes sense when you figure the cost of off-shore drilling or fracking or whatever vs sticking a tube in the ground in Texas or what have you.

caoilte 13y ago

His point is that our economies didn't cope well with the previous "gradual" price rise and that we can expect further "gradual" price rises in the next decade and that most economies will not cope well once more. You may not personally have been affected by the previous price rise, but in the developing world and for people already living below the poverty line these price rises will trigger more riots, revolutions, mass emigrations and resource wars. And then there's fertilizers...

notastartup 13y ago

It's like we hit a new "peak" every 4 or 6 years with an imminent apocalypse on the other end of it. I just don't see Saudi Kings panicking in their castles built by below minimum wage workers so they must have a lot of it but need to justify price increases in the future because "we are running out and need more US dollar for it"

rett12 13y ago
"My father rode a camel. I drive a car. My son flies a jet airplane. His son will ride a camel." Anonymous Saudi Sheik – 1982
- notastartup 13y ago
  A camel that drives the car with biochips infused in it's brain!
- baq 13y ago
  not anonymous and i'm not sure if the date is right. upvoted anyway. see also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rashid_bin_Saeed_Al_Maktoum#Development_of_Dubai http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rashid_bin_Saeed_Al_Maktoum#Dev...

dragonwriter 13y ago

Peak oil has nothing to do with how many barrels of oil are "left". Peak oil is about production rates. And the 1956 prediction of a peak around 1970 wasn't a prediction of a global peak, it was a prediction of a US peak -- which occurred just as predicted.

kirchhoff 13y ago
Except that US crude oil production is now rising. http://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=PET&s=MCRFPUS1&f=M http://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=PET&s=MC...
- mithras 13y ago
  Irrelevant when global production is declining.
  - BrokenPipe 13y ago
    Relevant when peak oil was just US.
- glaurent 13y ago
  but it's still below the levels of 1970.
- dragonwriter 13y ago
  > Except that US crude oil production is now rising. Its been rising for a while, but still way below the peak in 1970. The behavior observed is not at all inconsistent with the prediction.

PavlovsCat 13y ago

I wonder if there are networks of "think" tanks coming up with reasons to "stay the course" with our dependance on fossil fuels, similar to the one pushing global warming denial just recently exposed. > Here's my prediction: We will switch to some cheaper alternative long before oil ever runs out. But that's the thing, cheapness, or infinite availability, or both.. this threatens existing profits. Greater global good but less personal profit = not good enough. Hence my wondering about the existence of "advertising budgets" for steering away from that.