What happened with the 'peak oil' theory
David Deming:
...Renewable energy is less efficient and it currently lacks the ability to scale up or down to meet demand. Using current technology, it is at best a supplemental source of power. Similarly, electric vehicles have limitations that technology has so far been unable to master. There are no "filling stations" that allow you to recharge the batteries they run on it five minutes, much less ones that can b e found easily along well traveled routes.
What happened? The theory of peak oil was flawed from the beginning. While it's true that the amount of oil in the Earth's crust is fixed, it's difficult to accurately estimate the fraction of that oil that can be economically extracted. Production depends on technology, and it's impossible to reliably predict future technologies. In the past ten years, engineers have perfected techniques of horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing. These technologies allow us to produce petroleum directly from shales, the most common rock in the sedimentary column. Vast resources once thought to be unreachable have become economically viable. Thirty years ago, any claim to produce oil directly from shale would have been regarded as laughable.
In 1920, the U.S. Geological Survey estimated that "the world's supply of recoverable petroleum" was no more than 60 billion barrels. It was wrong. The world has already produced 1,400 billion barrels of oil. Worldwide, there is about 1,700 billion barrels of oil in reserve – nearly a 60-year supply at current production rates. And the size of the ultimate resource is likely to be greater than 10 trillion barrels.
Peak oil predictions and other Malthusian prognostications of resource limits have failed repeatedly for decades. But the people who invoke these false auguries of doom and gloom never seem to suffer any consequences. Any discussion of energy resources is tainted by ideology. Renewable energy sources such as wind and solar are portrayed as morally superior. Tendentious promotions of renewables invariably gloss over their inherent limitations. Wind and solar are intermittent and expensive. Both suffer from low power densities. These flaws are not political or even technological. They originate in the laws of physics and chemistry and are not likely to be overcome at any time in the foreseeable future.
Oil and other fossil fuels will continue to be our primary energy sources through the end of this century because they offer four great advantages. Compared to renewables, fossil fuels are inexpensive, reliable, abundant, and concentrated. The age of oil is far from being eclipsed. We have barely begun to exploit unconventional oil resources. The western U.S. alone contains at least 2 trillion barrels of petroleum in oil shale formations. At a current U.S. annual consumption rate of 7.2 billion barrels, that's a 278-year supply.
...
This is just mindless cornucopianism, with the usual vague claims about "new technologies" that will somehow make a finite resource infinite, laced with implications that oil is abiotic, minus any proof. The peaking dates of oil-producing nations show that to be a specious claim. If oil is magically regenerating, it hasn't shown up in any production curves. Shale fracking is just a last ditch effort to get tight supplies, not some miracle cure for finitude. People with short attention spans can't even look 5 years into the future, or acknowledge the frenetic drilling pace required to keep Bakken, etc. going.
ReplyDeletePeak Oil denial is practiced by hacks and geologists who think a lot like global-warming-denying meteorologists. They cherry-pick specific details but keep missing the big picture of Earth's finite capacities. The Earth's crust that holds oil is relatively thinner than the skin of an apple. How can an infinite amount of anything come from it? All these people do is keep the details vague enough to avoid serious math and future reckoning.
These old quotes from Julian Simon illustrate the fantasy-mindset that drives Peak Oil denial. He wished-away the whole meaning of the word FINITE and was too ignorant to see why.
"The word "finite" originates in mathematics, in which context we all learn it as schoolchildren. But even in mathematics the word's meaning is far from unambiguous. It can have two principal meanings, sometimes with an apparent contradiction between them. For example, the length of a one-inch line is finite in the sense that it bounded at both ends. But the line within the endpoints contains an infinite number of points; these points cannot be counted, because they have no defined size. Therefore the number of points in that one-inch segment is not finite. Similarly, the quantity of copper that will ever be available to us is not finite, because there is no method (even in principle) of making an appropriate count of it, given the problem of the economic definition of "copper," the possibility of creating copper or its economic equivalent from other materials, and thus the lack of boundaries to the sources from which copper might be drawn."
"Our energy supply is non-finite, and oil is an important example . . . the number of oil wells that will eventually produce oil, and in what quantities, is not known or measurable at present and probably never will be, and hence is not meaningfully finite."
(Julian Simon - The Ultimate Resource , 1981)