Article Review: Depletion and the Future Availability of Petroleum Resources

In the last edition of the Energy Journal of the International Association for Energy Economists an article was published that concluded that the recent high oil price spike was just an aberration, as there is plenty of low cost oil out there waiting to be produced. This claim was made by a group of scientists from the Pontifical Catholic University of Chili and Colorado School of mines, R. Aguilera, R. Eggert, C. Gustavo Lagos and J. Tilton.

In this post I critically review this study showing that many important factors have not been taken into account by Aguilera et al. (2009), making it highly probable that their conclusion is incorrect.

The Oil Drum