And yet nobody is agreeing with you. Snark on that. 
Yeah, wouldn’t be the first time. Fortunately I concern myself more with facts than what people think of me. 
These are the facts:
Facts are backed by citations. I’ve cited authority from the IEA and EIA. What have the peakers got? Nada but a lot of blah-blah.
You are operating on blind optimism and simply ignoring geological facts. Where is your evidence for these claims, other than the book of what-makes-you-feel-good? It doesn’t really matter that production is rising temporarily, based on tight oil that can’t possibly compete with the free-flowing crude of yesteryear. You’re treating sources of tight oil as if nothing (negative) can be predicted about their future output. Geologists already know that tight oil has limited potential.
Bakken is merely a blip on the U.S. oil production curve. People in Williston ND are enjoying temporary riches, as they have in ghosts towns throughout American history. North Dakota can’t magically escape the laws of diminishing returns. If you were alive in early 1920’s Oklahoma, you’d probably be claiming that their 1927 peak would never happen. Or the 1972 peak in Texas. Or the 1985 peak in California. Or the 1989 peak in Alaska (which includes ANWR’s potential). Do you follow me?
Double peaks are relatively rare, especially significant ones. This article on Pennsylvania (e.g. Pennzoil) is a good example of double peaks. They peaked initially in 1891, then again around 1937, but the 1891 peak was far higher, despite improved drilling methods. It correlates well with today’s hype over magic drilling that will give us endlessly higher yields from tighter deposits.
To make (crude) oil rise from the ground, you must break open deep rock formations and inject fluids and proppants at high pressure if the rock doesn’t yield easily. There are a limited number of ways to do that because it’s a mechanical process. If all the world’s oil was in a big lake that countless pipes could dip into, there would be no Peak Oil, but that’s not how oil was deposited. Kerogen shale isn’t even oil until it’s heated and heavily manipulated. Tar sands flow better but are still like asphalt. If the Keystone XL pipeline gets built, they’ll have to add a thinner to allow the processed bitumen to flow all those miles. It all adds up to extra energy and money vs. conventional crude oil. Unconventional oil is stubborn oil and you can’t change its basic personality.
It’s like walking up to a blackberry bush and naturally picking the easiest to reach, ripest berries first. The rest of the berries are increasingly marginal in quality and/or thornier to reach, with some unattainable. The planet has already been “picked clean” of the easiest oil since people are naturally opportunistic and/or lazy. Peak Oil deniers are pretending that none of that has already occurred, as if history only started last week!
I don’t know that I am a “Peak Oil denier”. More of a “so the low hanging fruit is gone–so what?” As you say, “people are naturally opportunistic”. I would add clever and resourceful. When oil becomes too much of a pain to obtain except for perhaps specialised uses like jet fighters, we will obtain energy elsewhere.
Let’s see if you can avoid putting words in my mouth just so you can create a strawman to cut down. I know that would be convenient since you have no other recourse at this point but if you think that I’m going to fall for that, you should think again.
No intelligent person on the other side of the peak oil argument is saying that we should go back to the wasteful days of gas guzzling SUV’s and the like nor does anyone think that is a realistic scenario even with fracking. So cut the hyperbole and stick to reality if you think you can manage that.
For example in the text I’ve quoted, did I EVER say the second peak would be higher? No. Is it possible? Maybe, I don’t know. What is the projected output of Saudia Arabia by 2030 and how does that compare to the US peak? I don’t know and don’t especially care to check since it’s irrelevant.
The point is that peak oil is bullshit for a host of reasons but they all center around the fact that technology will always make a fool of you.
If we can. Some things technological advance can accomplish, and some things the laws of physics simply will not allow. FTL travel is probably impossible no matter how much money and brainpower is devoted to R&D. Controlled nuclear fusion might not be, but at present it seems always 20 years away, like strong AI or nanotechnology.
A pessimistic view from The City in Mind (2001), by James Howard Kunstler, chapter on Atlanta, pp. 73-75:
Emphasis added.
I never said we are going to “merrily roll along” without instability. I am saying that said instability is the very thing that will galvanise us into action, and that we will be more than capable of rising to the task. And this author can claim alternative energy is insufficient, but I find that a dubious claim. Do you know how much solar energy reaches the surface of the continental United States each day? Hell, each second?
And for things that need fuel other than electricity to operate, like jet planes, I am sure that shale oil and coal (processed into some sort of refined liquid fuel) will be more than sufficient.
I also wonder why things like our ramping up of industrial production for World War II, our development of fission and fusion, our landing on the moon and developing computers and the Internet, are all so easily dismissed by this author as irrelevant to a discussion of our technological resourcefulness and ingenuity.
ETA: A conservative poster recently lumped the two of us together. And it is certainly true that we both share very left wing economic ideology. But you have a tendency, common on the far left but also the far right, toward gloom and doom millennialism. This is a tendency I do not share. I am more of an idealistic optimist, seeing a general upward progressive trend even with setbacks along the way.
May you prove right. Some people say James Howard Kunstler wants industrial civilization to collapse. Maybe so, maybe not, but I certainly don’t. I would make a very poor ploughman. I don’t even like nature. I’ve been camping, don’t care if I never do again. Natural beauty is something I can appreciate through photographs, and rarely do. All the things I love best are humans or things made by humans – cities, art, science, culture, literature. I am an environmentalist only because I see how all those things depend on a healthy natural environment.
This was back on page 1, but it’s been bothering me. The Ghawar issue is one of water injection, not fracking. Fracking is used for shale oil; Ghawar is a source of conventional oil.
As a long-time reader of the now-defunct Oil Drum, I’ve thought a lot about this peak oil issue. As others have stated upthread, there are economic effects of oil scarcity, regardless of how well oil production fits the mathematical model of Hubbert’s peak. Recently (in the past two years) oil has been in the $80 - 110 per barrel range (depending on whether you’re looking at Brent prices or WTI.) Shale oil is not profitable to extract when you are much below that price range. Our new dependence on shale oil means that lower oil prices would not, in the long run, sustain current rates of oil extraction. So our economy is stuck with high oil prices for the foreseeable future. As households spend more of their income on gasoline, they have less money left over for discretionary spending. More importantly, high gasoline prices affect the auto sector:
Quoted from this link:
10 of the last 11 recessions were preceded by oil price hikes
I don’t think this alone is going to cause civilization to collapse (as some people fear), but it is going to be one of many things that will limit growth in the 21st century and (in my opinion) negatively affect our standard of living.
[QUOTE=QuarkChild]
I don’t think this alone is going to cause civilization to collapse (as some people fear), but it is going to be one of many things that will limit growth in the 21st century and (in my opinion) negatively affect our standard of living.
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Doubtful. Our European brethren and sistren pay nearly double what we do in the US for refined gasoline, yet that doesn’t seem to have a negative impact on THEIR standard of living.
The price of oil will certainly continue to rise, that’s true enough (and something a lot of Peak Oil types don’t really understand, thinking it will be some sort of cliff that we’ll fall off of instead of a gradual and steady rise in price), but at some point it will reach a level where other technologies become economically viable and can compete with what is, in actually, a very cheap (still) energy source. My WAG is that this cross over will be when Americans are paying what the Europeans are paying for things like gasoline…at that point several alternatives will become initially economically viable and competitive. Through scales of economy and sheer competition they will eventually be cheaper than the oil based fuels they replace, but even if they aren’t they will be on a whole new consumption/price trajectory.
The problem with these discussion is that there is the reality that eventually, all commodities and products have a peak in their production. There was a peak whale oil, a peak buggy whip and a peak in horses for personal transport…and, one day there will be a peak in production for oil too. That’s a fact…one day, for whatever reason, we will have reached our peak in what we produce and will start to have a decline in future production. The trouble is that a lot of the Peak Oil™ folks don’t understand basic market forces and predict all manner of gloom and doom, end of the world, dogs and cats living together, blah blah blah. That’s just not going to happen. We aren’t suddenly going to run out of oil and the entire world comes crashing down. As oil becomes more scarce it will cost more. When the price point reaches a certain level then a lot of technology that’s already in the wings, as well as who knows what other things that haven’t been thought of yet since it’s hard to compete with cheap oil even today will become economically viable and competitive. When that happens there will be a transition and then, regardless of how much oil is still left there will be a huge decline in oil production. Sort of like the huge decline in whale oil production. There will also be a new host of billionaires I expect.
Fracking can also be used for conventional oil wells. It can sometimes be used to draw out a bit more oil when a well starts to play out and when water injection is no longer an option.
Water injection is certainly being used at Ghawar but hydraulic fracturing is also being increasingly used.
Look no further than Arkansas or Oklahoma for some examples of fracking performed in older, conventional wells (and probably creating earthquakes in the process).
I think that without any cites, those prices are unduly pessimistic by a large margin given what I see on wikipedia for the economics of kerogen.
But beyond that, when you’re talking about economics, it’s very easy to find correlations and say A Ha! Causation! But I think people especially on this forum should know better. Any stock market technical analyst can talk to you for days about such correlations but as to whether or not they are actually meaningful is quite another matter.
“Always” is a pretty strong word.
Well, buggy whip and whale oil production peaked because the horse and whale oil were replaced by the internal combustion engine and petroleum products. Civilization didn’t turn to petroleum because horse and whale oil production got too expensive.
Peak Oil might not result in a “Mad Max” scenario, but it seems foolhearty to assume that we will automatically find a replacement for what is one of the most useful products on the planet. Especially since many of those alternatives rely on petroleum in some form or another. People get outraged when the price of gas gets around $4.00 a gallon. Imagine how they will be after peak oil when demand keeps going up but supply keeps decreasing.
Yes. Yes it is. 
[QUOTE=msmith537]
Well, buggy whip and whale oil production peaked because the horse and whale oil were replaced by the internal combustion engine and petroleum products. Civilization didn’t turn to petroleum because horse and whale oil production got too expensive.
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I think we DID switch to petroleum when whale oil reached a certain price point. Do you have evidence that we switched for some other reason? Horses are an example of a better technology coming along that supplants another even though it’s initially (hell, even today) more expensive. The point wasn’t that these are one for one analogies to oil, merely to demonstrate that everything has a peak in production.
I don’t have to imagine…I’ve been in Europe (hell, Canada in, say Victoria) and seen what they pay. People might get outraged in the US when they have to pay $4.00 a gallon, but a lot of places on earth they pay a lot more (I think that even in the US $4.00 a gallon is the norm in some places). Outrage is all well and good, but when they start making different purchasing choices that will be the key. Even in Europe, gas is still relatively cheap, and other technologies are merely starting to make inroads. But as the price rises there will be more and more pressure from consumers on alternatives.
To me, it’s more ‘foolhearty’ to predict dire consequences when it’s not going to take magic technology or pie in the sky to make a switch. The technologies that will most likely replace cheap oil most likely already exist, and are not making large inroads today because oil IS still so cheap. As the costs go up that will merely open the road for technologies we already have to become competitive, and once the market settles on a clear winner (fuel cell, all electric, hybrid, whatever) the costs will come down as companies vie for market share. This isn’t magic nor does it take magical thinking…it’s simple economics. To me, Peak Oil™ and all the associated doomsday is what takes magical thinking.
Not just the whale oil though, petroleum oil had become cheap enough to be a replacement.
There’s no replacement for oil. Shale oil is an extension of the current problem, not a solution.
We need to develop some new technology, nothing we have today is going to do it.
No, we don’t. I can think of several technologies that COULD replace it today, from a personal transport perspective (which is where the majority of the oil goes towards). All of them have drawbacks of course, but mainly they are more expensive and thus no one is going to invest heavily in them at this time, since they wouldn’t be able to compete with oil/gasoline based transport. Why spend a lot in new infrastructure for a product that can’t currently compete with the existing one in the market? However, as oil becomes more expensive that equation starts to shift…and as market demand takes hold you suddenly have a lot of companies willing, even eager to take advantage and vie for a share of the new pie.
How do you get the electricity for electric cars?
You burn coal or gas, right? So if we use that instead of oil… how long until we run out of those also?
Fusion power really is the only viable alternative, and we are 50 years away from that.