Oil 1 Peak Oil 21
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No PeakThe “peak oil” theory is wrong – 70’s prove. Colin J. Campbell and Jean H. Laherrère, phD in geology at U of Oxford and exploration geologist for Texaco, Scientific American, “The End of Cheap Oil,” 3/98, p. 78 http://dieoff.org/page140.htm In 1973 and 1979 a pair of sudden price increases rudely awakened the industrial world to its dependence on cheap crude oil. Prices first tripled in response to an Arab embargo and then nearly doubled again when Iran dethroned its Shah, sending the major economies sputtering into recession. Many analysts warned that these crises proved that the world would soon run out of oil. Yet they were wrong. Their dire predictions were emotional and political reactions; even at the time, oil experts knew that they had no scientific basis. Just a few years earlier oil explorers had discovered enormous new oil provinces on the north slope of Alaska and below the North Sea off the coast of Europe. By 1973 the world had consumed, according to many experts’ best estimates, only about one eighth of its endowment of readily accessible crude oil (so-called conventional oil). The five Middle Eastern members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) were able to hike prices not because oil was growing scarce but because they had managed to corner 36 percent of the market. Later, when demand sagged, and the flow of fresh Alaskan and North Sea oil weakened OPEC’s economic stranglehold, prices collapsed. Either oil production will continue to rise or industrialized countries will cut back on imports – oil won’t peak. Ronald Bailey, science correspondent for Reason magazine, Reason, “Peak Oil Panic,” 5/06, http://www.reason.com/news/show/36645.html The good news is that the peak oil doomsters are probably wrong that world oil production is about to decline forever. Most analysts believe that world petroleum supplies will meet projected demand at reasonable prices for at least another generation. The bad news is that much of the world’s oil reserves are in the custody of unstable and sometimes hostile regimes. But the oil producing nations would be the ultimate losers if they provoked an “oil crisis,” since that would spur industrialized countries to cut back on imports and develop alternative energy technologies. No PeakOil doomsday theorists are as old as the industry itself, and they’ve always been wrong. Ronald Bailey, science correspondent for Reason magazine, Reason, “Peak Oil Panic,” 5/06, http://www.reason.com/news/show/36645.html Predictions of imminent catastrophic depletion are almost as old as the oil industry. An 1855 advertisement for Kier’s Rock Oil, a patent medicine whose key ingredient was petroleum bubbling up from salt wells near Pittsburgh, urged customers to buy soon before “this wonderful product is depleted from Nature’s laboratory.” The ad appeared four years before Pennsylvania’s first oil well was drilled. In 1919 David White of the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) predicted that world oil production would peak in nine years. And in 1943 the Standard Oil geologist Wallace Pratt calculated that the world would ultimately produce 600 billion barrels of oil. (In fact, more than 1 trillion barrels of oil had been pumped by 2006.) During the 1970s, the Club of Rome report The Limits to Growth projected that, assuming consumption remained flat, all known oil reserves would be entirely consumed in just 31 years. With exponential growth in consumption, it added, all the known oil reserves would be consumed in 20 years. These dour predictions gained credibility when the Arab oil crisis of 1973 quadrupled prices from $3 to $12 per barrel (from $16 to $48 in 2006 dollars) and when the Iranian oil crisis more than doubled oil prices from $14 per barrel in 1978 to $35 per barrel by 1981 (from $45 to $98 in 2006 dollars). In response, the federal government imposed price controls on oil and gas in the 1970s and established fuel economy standards to encourage the sale of more efficient automobiles. The sense of doom did not dissolve. In 1979 Energy Secretary Schlesinger proclaimed, “The energy future is bleak and is likely to grow bleaker in the decade ahead.” The Global 2000 Report to President Carter, issued in 1980, predicted that the price of oil would rise by 50 percent, reaching $100 per barrel by 2000. Peak oil theorists base theories on shoddy science and ignore innovation – that’s why they’re always wrong. Vaclav Smil, Distinguished Professor at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, Peak Oil Forum, “Peak Oil: A Catastrophist Cult and Complex Realities,” Jan-Feb 06, http://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~vsmil/pdf_pubs/WorldWatch.pdf The modern tradition of concerns about an impending decline of resource extraction began in 1865 with Victorian economist William Stanley Jevons (1835–1882), who concluded that falling coal output must spell the end of Britain’s national greatness as it is “of course…useless to think of substituting any other kind of fuel for coal.” Substitute oil for coal in the last sentence and you get the erroneous foundations of the doomsday sentiment shared by the peak-oil catastrophists. There is no need to elaborate how wrong Jevons was. The first half of the 20th century had its share of peak forecasts but Jevonsian sentiment was forcefully reintroduced by M.King Hubbert with his correct timing of the U.S.oil production (minus Alaska!). This feat led the peak-oil groupies to consider Hubbert’s Gaussian exhaustion curve with the reverence reserved by the Biblical fundamentalists to Genesis. In reality, it is a simplistic “geology-only” model based on rigidly predetermined reserves and ignoring any innovative advances or price shifts. Not surprisingly, it has repeatedly failed. Hubbert himself put the peak of global oil extraction between 1993 and 2000. In 1977 the Workshop on Alternative Energy Strategies forecast the global oil peak as early as 1990 and most likely between 1994 and 1997.In 1979 the U.S.Central Intelligence Agency believed that global output must fall within a decade. In the same year British Petroleum,the world’s second largest oil company, predicted the world production peak in 1985 and the total output in the year 2000 nearly 25 percent below that maximum. In reality, global oil output in the year 2000 was nearly 25 percent above the 1985 level! Some of the latest peak-oil proponents have already seen their forecasts fail: Campbell’s first peak was to be in 1989, Ivanhoe’s peak was in 2000, Deffeyes had it in 2003 (and now, ridiculously, on Thanksgiving 2005). But they would argue that this makes no difference as that inevitable event will take place within months or years. Moreover, they claim that matters are now entirely different. No PeakConsensus goes neg – experts believe an oil peak isn’t imminent. Steven Schafersman, petroleum geologist, “Be Scared; Be Very Scared,”10/10/02, www.freeinquiry.com/skeptic/badgeology/energy/commentary.htm Historically, the popular appeal of a doomsday forecast of declining world oil supply never seems to disappear, but why this should be the case is a mystery. Petroleum industry history books recount numerous times during the last hundred years when petroleum and geological experts predicted the imminent demise of civilization due to our planet running out of oil. Every one of these bogus predictions has been so thoroughly refuted by the spectacular increases in petroleum production over the past century, that such a prediction has become something of a joke among most petroleum geologists and engineers. So why should the present prediction of Campbell, Laherrere, and Deffeyes be any different? For most petroleum experts, the modern depletion prediction is not different--they believe that the three gentlemen-Cassandras are victims of self-deception, since there is no genuine scientific or economic reason to believe that oil depletion is right around the corner. Let's examine this issue in more detail, and present the primary opponents to the doomsday viewpoint--three eminent geologists--none of whom were present to defend the interpretation most representative of the petroleum industry and federal government, although Guy Caruso and Michael Economides did a credible job of defending that interpretation. No PeakPeak oil theorists are wrong – their hastily adjusted figures prove that oil resources are increasing faster than consumption. Michael C. Lynch, Strategic Energy & Economic Research, Inc., Center for International Studies at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MINERALS & ENERGY VOL 18 NO 1, “The New Pessimism about Petroleum Resources,” 2003, http://www.precaution.org/lib/05/lynch_debunking_hubbert.20030615.pdf. The many inconsistencies and errors, along with the ignorance of most prior research, indicates that the current school of Hubbert modelers have not discovered new, earth-shaking results but rather joined the large crowd of those who have found that large bodies of data often yield particular shapes, from which they attempt to divine physical laws. The work of the Hubbert modelers has proven to be incorrect in theory, and based heavily on assumptions that the available evidence shows to be wrong. They have repeatedly misinterpreted political and economic effects as rejecting geological constraints, and misunderstood the causality underlying exploration, discovery and production. The primary flaw in Hubbert-type models is a reliance on URR as a static number rather than a dynamic variable, changing with technology, knowledge, infrastructure and other factors, but primarily growing. Campbell and Laherrere claim to have developed better analytical methods to resolve this problem, but their own estimates have been increasing, and increasingly rapidly. The result has been exactly as predicted in Lynch (1996) for this method: a series of predictions of near-term peak and decline, which have had to be repeatedly revised upwards and into the future. So much so as to suggest that the authors themselves are providing evidence that oil resources are under no strain, but increasing faster than consumption! 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