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Peak oil doesn't mean that all oil will suddenly be gone. It just means that constantly increasing demand cannot be satsfied forever. For well over a century, t

• lsc 17y ago
  Oil is not the only source of energy. Granted, it is one of the most convenient, but one could use energy from a fission plant to extract oil sands, etc... If you don't care about the environment, there are even easier solutions; processes for making gas out of coal have been around since before world war 2.
  • mr_eel 17y ago
    That doesn't make sense. If we use fission, why bother with the oil? The real point here is not when we run out of oil, but rather when it becomes too inconvenient -- too costly in other words. Even with new finds, oil is becoming a more and more inconvenient source of energy. The reason it remains attractive is because of the infrastructure surrounding it's production, transport and use.
    • lsc 17y ago
      because it's easier to power a car with gas than with electricity. Like you said, the infrastructure is in place.
• netsp 17y ago
  That is true. Oil production doesn't even need to drop off very fast to produce drastic effects. The reason peak oil is taken so seriously is because of inelastic demand. Regardless of the cost of oil, we consume it in roughly equal amounts. This means that a small drop off in the production of oil could lead to incredibly high prices. The reason that is bad is the same reason that demand for oil is inelastic. The cost of not consuming oil is very high.
• joe_the_user 17y ago
  Wikipedia is not the best source. Not necessarily the worst either but still. The phrase "Peak Oil" has become much more than a statement that at some point in time the human production of oil will. For example, one of the primary boosters of the phrase was the website "Dieoff.org" which anticipates the death of most people on the planet. And you've demonstrated this yourself by jumping to the Hubbert curve... The thing about a Hubbert curve is that it is base on regional data. Production in various regions has, rather roughly, indeed expand exponentially and then gone down exponentially. But where this behavior has been roughly seen, the exponential decline has happened because the particular sources have been replaced by cheaper sources elsewhere. Since this cannot happen on a world scale, there is every reason to expect world-scale production on existing fields to go down gradually rather than exponentially. Further, as the GP notes, more oil is being discovered even into the declining range. This relatively slow decline will provide some impetus for alternative energy sources - it already has to an extent. The world has quite a few problems but approach that our "Peak Oil" friends use for framing these problems is not useful.
  • brazzy 17y ago
    As I wrote, the Wikipedia link refers to a source - which is a report from the US government. The cheapest and most efficient sources have already been found. They're in the middle east, and many of them have recently reached the point where production is declining despite all technical efforts. And those efforts to sustain a very high production rate from a diminishing source mean that the decline could indeed become quite steep. As for new discoveries, the problem is that they, too, are declining (and have done so for over 2 decades).
• lupin_sansei 17y ago
  > It's physically impossible for this development to continue indefinitely Why can't oil be made synthetically? Say by genetically engineering bacteria etc. That being the case I don't see any limit to oil production
  • ncarlson 17y ago
    He's talking about development in terms of oil well depletion.
    • lupin_sansei 17y ago
      Sure, but why limit our oil sources to just oil wells?
  • brazzy 17y ago
    First law of thermodynamics. The whole point of oil is that it's energy-rich. To make it synthetically, you need to take energy from somewhere - but if you intend to use the oil to produce energy, why not use it directly instead of going through the intermediate oil stage. Basically, synthetically-made oil only makes sense only if the process involves an efficient way to turn a widely-available but inferior form of energy into oil. Basically, that's bio-ethanol: already being done, but not feasible at the scale it would take to satisfy all current demand for oil-
    • lupin_sansei 17y ago
      Oil is a convenient, efficient storage mechanism for energy, and there's a vast existing "user base" or machinery that runs on oil. If we use non-oil energy to provide heat and light in order to "grow" oil via some organic process we could still be ahead.
  • crpatino 17y ago
    This is possible of course. After all, the stuff we extract from the ground came into existence somehow in nature, and we know we are good at speeding up nature to do staff we want. The two problems I see are scale and unwillingness. On the one hand, the conventional wisdom say that the natural oil was made over millions and millions of years. Even if we manage to find a way to speed up nature 1000x we are in the thousands and thousands of years to regenerate the whole global reserve. At present consumption rates, know reserves will last less than 50 years. This means we would be better off developing alternate energies, reducing consumption, and reserving oil exclusively for strategic uses only (you cannot fly a plane without fossil fuels, but you can make your chairs of wood instead of plastic). The other issue I see, and I belive there is no solution at all, is unwillingness from the politicians and the society in general to acknowledge the problem and do what needs to be done. Every child learns in the school that oil is a non renewable resource... and what we do? We consume more and more of the stuff every year. It is depressing to see the huge amount of utter garbage that gets made and sold out of oil, frivolous stuff, junk that nobody really loves or cares about... Markets are slow to transfer information to economic actors when conditions change drastically. Lack of political organized response, we are in for very interesting times in the decades to come.
• joe_the_user 17y ago
  Another interesting thing this peak oil/anti-peak oil debate shows to me is the difficulty of factoring secular and cyclical processes together. Yes, oil production will peak at some point is the too terribly distant future, but no, the pattern of decreased oil consumption won't be the same as the patter of increased oil consumption because the factors generating the decline won't be the same as the factors that generated rise.