Maybe I shouldn't always read these thing (especially when they are billed as "the clearest, most comprehensive op-eds on peak oil I've ever read in a mainstream outlet") with such a critical eye, but sometimes it seems to easy to spot the hyperbole.

Quote:

Do the math, and you'll see that the end of oil is, at most, 30 years away.

Excuse me?  That's not what the government's Hirsch Report said, or what the more recent GAO report said.

Is there any, defensible and rational analysis that puts the end of oil a mere 30 years away?

--- G. R. L. Cowan, former hydrogen fan
Oxygen expands around boron fire, car goes --
http://www.eagle.ca/~gcowan/boron_blast.html

That said, the end of cheap oil is effectively the end of oil as it has been understood for the last ~100 years, as a linchpin of our economy.  Our relationship with the stuff is going to have to change tremendously.  But that doesn't excuse rhetorical sloppiness.

Why wasn't that more moderate message given?

Why did we get the "how will I get food" bit in this paragraph?

At this point, you might be asking yourself: When oil becomes scarce, how will I get food? That's a very good question. Here are a few more: Will my garbage get picked up? How will my water district purify and deliver water and treat sewage without petrochemicals? What if I need an ambulance? What if my home is one of the 7.7 million that rely on oil for heating? Which of my medications are made out of petrochemicals? How will I get to work? Will I even have a job anymore?

That is an understandable emotional reaction to the idea of "peak oil" but it certainly should not be given weight in any rational introduction.

The reasons for this are many, but I think one undercurrent is a misunderstanding by the author of the Hirsch Report, and the famous "10 years preparation."

If you haven't read the report yourself, please do so, and as you do, notice that the Hirsch Report is written with a goal: to maintain the trajectory of our current economic growth in the face of peak oil.

For Hirsch et al, an adjustment to a lower energy and more sustainable lifestyle is out of the picture.  It was not their charter.

On the other hand, we environmentalists might find quite a few win-win scenarios in lower energy economies.

We certainly do not need to declare, as this article does:

Depending on whom you ask, the impacts of peak oil range from dire to catastrophic: At best, get ready for a crippling recession and widespread inflation. At worst, we face severe global food shortages that threaten wide-scale starvation and an overall breakdown of social and economic institutions. And if history is any guide, we can expect a series of military invasions into every remaining oil hot spot in the world - invasions that may, by the way, require even more fossil fuels than we could possibly expropriate by force.

You could be right, if by very shortly you mean 1,000 or more years in the future.
news.google.com/news?q=oil+arctic
news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/08/070823-arctic-oil.html

Arctic Oil Rush Sparks Battles Over Seafloor
[...]
The Arctic, known better for its polar bears and melting sea ice than its fossil fuels, may soon become a hot spot for oil--spurring an international rush to stake claims on the seafloor.
[...]
The Arctic Ocean's seabed may hold billions of gallons of oil and natural gas--up to 25 percent of the world's undiscovered reserves, according to U.S. Geological Survey estimates--leading some experts to call the region the next Saudi Arabia.

The Etelson article is correct that current daily demand is around 84 million barrels a day, though how far it will rise with higher prices is an interesting question.

On the other hand the article gives a flat one trillion barrels as the amount still in the ground.  There is actually an argument between the "one-plus trillion" and the "three-plus trillion" folks.

It's one thing to say which camp you support, but another to leave the argument out of discussion.

Apparently he was talking to you, Nucbuddy.

We can't supply-side our way out of this.  Certainly not with more fossil fuels.  Run the numbers.

it's fine to say 'at this rate population will be X in 100 years' but it's another to think about what other impacts and feedback loops might influence that prediction.

i suppose you could say the housing bubble is a case in point ;-).  prices were rising on a pretty good exponential for 10 year or so ... until they weren't.

Material usage of oil will continue indefinantly.

http://greyfalcon.net/h2car
http://i-r-squared.blogspot.com/2007/08/ls9s-oil-crapping ...


-David Ahlport

Apparently, the latter was meant.
spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,503755,00.html

Last week, the project -- called the Circum-Arctic Oil and Gas Resource Appraisal -- released its first results, for an area of some 500,000 square kilometers off the east coast of Greenland. According to the USGS's best guess, the so-called East Greenland Rift Basins could hold some 31.4 billion barrels of oil or natural gas>. If proven, the area would rank northeastern Greenland 19th on the list of proven oil and gas reserves.
[...]
should the ice eventually disappear as a result of climate change, the Arctic promises to become the target of a geo-political gold rush. By next summer, the USGS study may provide the competitors with a good idea of just what they are rushing for.

31.4 billion barrels * 42 = 1.32 trillion gallons.

Note that the area in question is tiny. The entire crust may hold thousands of times the quantities of oil currently estimated.
reason.com/news/show/36645.html

The USGS figures that the total world endowment of conventional oil resources is equivalent to about 5.9 trillion barrels of oil. [...] The USGS calculates that humanity has already consumed about 1 trillion barrels of oil equivalent, which means 82 percent of the world's endowment of oil and gas resources remains to be used.

The USGS has a long history of continuous exponential-increases in its oil-reserve estimates.
runet.edu/~wkovarik/oil/5oilreservehistory.html

• 1920 -- David White, chief geologist of USGS, estimates total oil remaining in the US at 6.7 billion barrels. "In making this estimate, which included both proved reserves and resources still remaining to be discovered, White conceded that it might well be in error by as much as 25 percent."
  
• 1980 -- Remaining proven oil reserves put at 648 billion barrels
  
• 1993 -- Remaining proven oil reserves put at 999 billion barrels
  
• 2000 -- Remaining proven oil reserves put at 1016 billion barrels.

That said, it is true that the general press trumpets numbers that are low compared to world consumption (as we said, around 84 million barrels a day, or around 30 billion barrels per year.

How important is a find which is approximately equal to one year's current consumption?  A lot depends on how many more of those finds you have.

Meanwhile a gallon of milk has shot up to over $3.50 in some markets, thus making it more expensive than gasoline.  Go figure.

True, liquid petroleum prices seem to have been on the rise since 2001 due to some predicted competition from China and India.  It's not going to be fun in the future but I'd like to leave the reader with a possibly more serious problem.

Water.

Heck with gasoline and all that, can you imagine if the entire Southwestern US went absolutely dry?  "Peak water" seems dangerous to predict, but in a way I can see it happening already there.  It makes me want to see how many people live in the area between San Diego, El Paso, Las Vegas, Reno, and San Fransisco.  Venture a guess?
-sammie

Onward through the fog

Question growth!  

--- G. R. L. Cowan, former hydrogen fan
Oxygen expands around boron fire, car goes --
http://www.eagle.ca/~gcowan/boron_blast.html

Heavy oils, tar, and shale oil are hydrogenatable via nuclear power. (This is why heavy crude is more-valuable than light crude. It has more carbon, and the carbon is what is valuable since it can act as a hydrogen-carrier. Hydrogen, and hydrogenation, thanks to nuclear-power, are available essentially free-of-charge.) All discrete resources are rechargeable, but general bound-energy is not rechargeable. The earth's crust happens to contain 40-trillion tons of uranium, which works out to billions of years worth of present-burn-rate general bound-energy -- or half a millennium of 10-trillion-fold-per-millennium (3.04% per year) civilization-energy burn-rate growth.
google.com/search?q=uranium+crust+cowan+grl

World petroleum extraction rates can continue increasing yearly for many decades, and probably for many centuries. There really is a lot of oil in the crust, and even $500 for a barrel of heavy crude would still work out to a gasoline cost of only $5/gallon (assuming a 42-gallon barrel of heavy-crude, tar, or shale-oil can be nuclear-hydrogenated into 100 gallons of gasoline {or other light hydrocarbon fuel such as iso-octane, ethanol, or methanol}). Again, the nuclear-hydrogenation is essentially cost-free, so the cost of gasoline simply depends upon the price you set for the oil on the land you own.

Some regions do run a reasonable water budget based on rain/snowfall and replenishment.  Others withdraw ancient water ('fossil' water) from aquifers - rains that fell long ago.

So while it is becoming in vogue to say 'water' is a global issue, I think it is a bit different than the oil situation.  It's more like global water awareness is an important issue.  Regional water budgets should be examined.

Oil is indeed traded in a world market.  The price and/or supply rise and fall for pretty much all of us.

On the "price band thing" for oil, we did touch (and in some regions exceed) all time highs for inflation-adjusted price.  The worrying thing in the graphs for me is that it hasn't been an even randomness.  Strong bull markets for oil have been rare and this recent one has been unusual.  It seems strongly supply-demand related, and less political than the 80's spikes.

Were the producers just not ready for globalization and higher demand?  Or are they running out of 'easy oil' to drill?

Citing arctic oil as an answer seems to say that we are looking 'less easy' places.

Gasoline is not oil. Oil has not been near its peak (some $110/barrel, in terms of monthly averages), not to mention exceeded it, in decades. The 2007 CNN article you linked states, "The price of $1.35 in 1981 works out to $3.15 in current dollars, [Trilby Lundberg, publisher of the survey] said." Perhaps Lundberg is mistaken. Tom's inflation calculator says that $1.35 in 1981 equals $3.31 in 2007.

By the way, Trilby Lundberg is a sibling of the famous Peak-Oil/tear-up-the-roads activist Jan Lundberg.

Comments on: Oil Price Queen Encourages Increased Consumption ...
Trilby Lundberg is basically telling us the Earth is flat. ... She spews big oil propaganda and he (Jan Lundberg) runs culturechange.org and speaks out ...

Audubon: InciteJan
Lundberg tore up his driveway to make way for a garden. ... (His sister, Trilby Lundberg, who runs the company now, declines to comment. ...

I certainly understand that gasoline is not oil.

FWIW, our local high for regular gasoline here in Orange County California was just under $3.50 in the week of May 6th.

Now beyond that, what are you trying to tell me?  Do you know next year's high, and how globalization and supply will play out?

California requires a special blend of gasoline. Therefore, it is at a leverage disadvantage in price-negotiations with refineries, and further-therefore California gas prices are inherently irrelevant.

Next year, the earth's crust will contain 40-trillion tons of uranium and perhaps quadrillions or more barrels of oil. Oil prices next year will continue to be as irrelevant as they are this year, and other than that will probably continue to be priced slightly-higher than normal because of lack of investment in oil-field development and general incompetence throughout the third world. More relevantly, oil prices 100 years from now will continue to be low enough to easily be able to fuel a worldwide fleet of billions of cars like this one.

Furthermore, there's the net exports problem: when a producing country's production declines at X% per year, and their domestic use grows at Y% per year, the rate of decline of oil available for export (i.e. for the US, etc) declines at greater than the sum of X% + Y%, and that rate of decline accelerates as the years go by (even if the component rates X and Y don't change).  This effect only shows up if the producer in question is already using a significant fraction (more than about 30% IIRC) domestically.  But most of them are, with the exception of a few underdeveloped nations like Nigeria.

Yeah, it's a weird thing and I didn't believe it either.  But it's really easy to set up a spreadsheet and prove it to yourself.

IMO, it is a little less rational to pick a particular path to the future and say that's it, the fat lady has sung, that's what we'll get.

Doomers do that, when they argue that widespread starvation and social collapse are the 'most likely' outcome of peak oil.  And cornucopians do that when they inist that they know, right now, that it will be Scuderias for everybody.

It might be, or it might not.

GreenEngineer reminds us that crude + condensates have demonstrated a short term peak.  They might go up again, but then again, they might not.

This is about planning in the face of uncertainty.

Three factors are at play here:

1. There is alot of oil left, but the easy stuff is gone.  What's left is mostly geologically (ultra deepwater, e.g. Jack #2) or geopolitically (Sudan, Nigeria, Venezuela) difficult, or both.
   
2. It takes years, sometimes as much as a decade, to bring a new reserve into production.  The lead time is longer with the more difficult wells.
   
3. There is a serious brain-drain in the industry now.  The average age of a working petroleum engineer is something like 45, and we're not graduating droves of new engineers.  So alot of hard-won experience is going to be lost as those folks retire, which is going to make upcoming challenges more challenging.