Why the oil crunch may grow worse

The fear is that all the easy-to-reach crude has been found. These may be ‘the good old days,’ one expert says.

With gasoline and oil costing once-unthinkable barrels of cash, the notion that things in our petroleum-addicted world soon will get worse — maybe much, much worse — is spreading fast.

…”As much as you’re uncomfortable with today’s oil prices, these are going to be the good old days,” oil expert Robert L. Hirsch told a recent Santa Barbara gathering of policymakers and environmentalists. “We’re talking about pain here that is unimaginable.”


…Geologists and others in the oil industry hotly dispute peak oil predictions, but an increasingly alarmed public has injected fresh momentum into the movement.

“Peak oil is percolating all over the place,” a seismic shift from when peak oilists were considered the petro-world’s “lunatic fringe,” Hirsch said.

Websites devoted to the subject, such as the Oil Drum, have been proliferating. You can buy peak oil boxer shorts at one site and laugh at peak oil jokes on another.

Consultant Matthew Simmons, known in some circles as Mr. Peak Oil, said he is flooded with speaking requests and gets up to 30 Google alerts a day when his name pops up in a new item.

The boiling debate, in which peakists and their critics flay one another’s conclusions and intelligence, is fed by imprecise terminology and oil-field data that are questionable or incomplete. For starters, views vary wildly on how much oil remains in Saudi Arabia — crucial information for projecting worldwide supplies.

LA Times