Peak Oil Happened Already

Clifford Wirth, peak oil specialist, thinks we reached peak already; 2007 was the magic year. If you look at the run-up in oil prices in terms of peak oil, it might really make sense.

Peak oil doesn’t mean there won’t be more oil out there, nor does it mean that we won’t continue to use too much of it; it means we will find less additional oil than we use up. But as prices rise, we will economize (probably why prices went “down” this week), i.e. we will use less wherever we can. But peak oil means that what will be discovered will be less than what has been discovered already, that total reserves will dwindle, that what we use will be more than what we find to replace it, and the oil left to extract will cost more and more, like the deep sea oil requiring platforms costing billions of dollars to construct. Or oil extracted from shale and tar sands, extremely expensive and energy intensive just to produce. It’s a lot different from the Texas or Arabian oil fields where all you had to do was drill a hole a few hundred feet down and out would come a gusher, oil that would literally cost only a few dollars a barrel to produce.

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