There's a much better article covering the topic of 'peak oil' here: http://earlywarn.blogspot.com/2013/08/what-oil-drum-meant.html http://earlywarn.blogspot.c

There's a much better article covering the topic of 'peak oil' here: http://earlywarn.blogspot.com/2013/08/what-oil-drum-meant.html http://earlywarn.blogspot.com/2013/08/what-oil-drum-meant.ht... I don't think the more intelligent people who argued that peak oil was a reality ever thought it was about anything other than the economics of extracting oil. Most of the discussion on the oil drum focused on what happened when the cost of energy outpaced economic growth. While I think fracking has been a reprieve, and that natural gas can supply our electricity grid, I still think that there are a number of long-term issues we may face as there are no direct substitutes for cheap oil and all of the infrastructure we have invested to it (let's call it the oil grid). It's not cheap to replace or retrofit an infrastructure of 250 million cars / trucks / etc in the US that run on gasoline. Or retrofit the gasoline stations for natural gas for that matter. Natural gas may be an alternate source of electricity, doesn't mean it is a perfect or necessarily cheap substitute for oil. Similar techniques to fracking have been in the industry for many years btw - they started out with nitrogen injection. It did have the effect of temporarily boosting production in declining fields. The unintended consequence however was that instead of a gentle decline, when the fields using nitrogen injection did finally decline in production their 'curves' went very sharply down (instead of a gentle gaussian curve). The rate of decline after nitrogen injection has been extreme in many oil fields around the world. See what happened to the super giant oil field in Mexico - Cantarell. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cantarell_Field http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cantarell_Field I think like Hubbert's peak - which attempted to sum the aggregate harvesting of oil at the time given what technology he was aware of - has been a fairly good approximation until very recently of what actually happened. In my opinion, while new technology may have turned the curve back upward for oil production, I think the aggregate use of fracking may also result in a curve that on the global level also declines sharply (just as in individual fields with nitrogen injection).