What Peak Oilers Won’t Tell You About Peak Oil

M. King Hubbert is the father of Peak Oil theory. In a 1956, he paper correctly called the timing of the peak in U.S. crude oil production in the early 1970s.

Neo-Malthusians and Progressives make sure you know about Hubbert’s pessimistic outlook for conventional crude oil. They made Hubbert a household name, the only oil technologist whose name they use without adding “sellout” or “whore”.

But here’s what they never tell you about what Hubbert’s wrote…

1. The name of the paper is “Nuclear Energy and the Fossil Fuels”

(.pdf link)

…Fig. 30 … covers the time span from 5,000 years ago — the dawn of recorded history — to 5,000 years in the future. On such a time scale the discovery, exploitation and exhaustion of the fossil fuels will be seen to be an ephemeral event in the span of recorded history. There is promise, however, provided mankind can solve its international problems and not destroy itself with nuclear weapons, and provided the world population (which is now expanding at such a rate as to double in less than a century) can somehow be brought under control, that we may at last have found an energy supply adequate for our needs for at least the next few centuries of the “foreseeable future.”

Hubbert arrived at this conclusion after cataloging the uranium potential in the United States. Much of that potential exists in widespread shale deposits in various parts of the nation.

Hubbert’s vision of the future may have become reality in France. He must have been disappointed to see what a bunch of hysterical twits the American environmentalist movement can be when they derailed American nuclear development after Three Mile Island/The China Syndrome.

2. Hubbert saw considerable potential in the oil shales.

The oil obtainable from oil shales in the United States has been taken to be 1,000 billion barrels. [Hubbert’s high-end crude oil projection for the Lower 48 was 200 billion barrels. – Ed.] This is based upon a revised figure recently released by the United States Geological Survey of 900 billion barrels of oil for the shales of Colorado. A.C. Rubel has recently made a review from published literature of all the bituminous shales of the United States which are potential sources of oil, and has arrived at an estimate of a possible 2.5 trillion barrels of oil obtainable from shale.

(Oil shales are massive kerogen-rich formations which are found in the Mountain West, primarily western Colorado. Kerogen is a waxy, immature oil precursor, not to be confused with conventional oil in the Bakken shale of North Dakota and elsewhere.)

Ironically, Hubbert foresaw the potential energy locked up in the shales in the form kerogen and fissionable materials, but did not appreciate the potential of shale as a source of natural gas. Shales currently supply 40+% of our gas.

More on that topic in a future blog.

5 Comments on "What Peak Oilers Won’t Tell You About Peak Oil"

BillT on Tue, 29th Nov 2011 12:28 pm 



Dream on… Did Hubbard mention the billions of tons of uranium in sea water? Yes, there is a lot of energy in the soils and waters of the world, but, they require more energy to extract and process than they will provide. A real source-to-replacement energy evaluation of most energy sources outside oil, would prove that most are a wash or a loss. This idea is one of them. All require the oil input somewhere.

WhenTheEagleFlies on Tue, 29th Nov 2011 3:24 pm 



At my place of work, a DoD installation, posters announcing that all Navy vehicles will be hybrids by the year 2015 were displayed in the lobby, elevators, etc. just this week. Go ahead and tell me that peak oil is not real. Also, bear in mind that the DoD operates according to reality, not politics.

Gale Whitaker on Tue, 29th Nov 2011 4:54 pm 



Another pitiful attempt by conservatives to preserve the status quo. There is a constant stream of articles like this that trick the public into relaxing about our energy future. Humans are a gullible species (witness the Madoff mess) that like to believe that the hand of god is watching over them. The Canadians seem to care less about the destruction of land by mining for oil sands. I hope that the US doesn’t fall into the same trap.

sunweb on Tue, 29th Nov 2011 9:19 pm 



let this guy put one of the storage casks in his basement for radiant heat. Let him build his house next to a fracking well and get his water there.
I am sorry he is afraid of his future. Perhaps, he is not very physically creative.
We need our electric can openers, carving knives. Speaking about the future, without a doubt we need our snowmobiles. We need our wave runners, our four wheelers, and our big ass trucks for groceries. We need lights on everywhere to tell us what to buy all night long, we need wall size television sets, our golf carts for exercise and our electric can openers. We need our oil and natural gas by golly. We don’t need no frackin’ water.
From the Curmudgeon Vignettes, read more at:
http://sunweber.blogspot.com/2011/07/curmudgeon-vignettes.html

Pete Wellhofer on Wed, 30th Nov 2011 2:56 pm 



What is the big deal with nuclear power?
OK — it’s expensive — we don’t even know how much, because nobody adds the cost of “clean-up” and perpetual safeguarding of all the hot “spent” fuel and infrastructure (all the metal around the fuel has to be “stored” long after the reactor is “de-commissioned”). But let’s say it’s a reasonable $100/kW hr.

Compared to what? Compared to nothing at all — because everyone agrees that the fossil fuels are going to “run out” someday, tomorrow or the day after. And we can’t let that happen, because electricity is not equal to or immediately substitutable for oil and gas.

So the main argument against nuclear seems to be: “it’s scary!” Boo. Well let’s look at the facts: it’s not dangerous — not like coal, oil, and gas.

Take Japan, for example. A tiny place that has been nuked three times, with barely a flicker on their economy. Twice by US (WWII), and once by their brilliant engineers (Fukyoushima). What is the harm?

Take Ukraine: their engineers nuked themselves bigtime (Chernobyl), and what happened? It’s a tourist destination. Yes, they have tourist buses on regular routes to see it.

How about the US? We have nuked our Western desserts into glass, and spread plutonium dust into the air, soil, and waters from Canada to Mexico, LA to DC.

What exactly is the problem? Radiation is a natural product of the consumption of massive quantities of energy: be it coal, shale gas, or uranium. Let’s get over it, shall we? It’s not that bad.

The problem with nukes is not the risk of radiation — it’s that we don’t know how much they cost. Same is true with coal and oil and gas — I have never seen an accounting for the total cost of the energy — does anyone have those numbers?

If we were to burn all the recoverable coal, oil, and gas in the planet, what would the atmospheric CO2 be? That’s what we are doing, nitch var? So why not calculate it ?

If we built a nuke in every city center on the planet (morally they should be exactly in the city center – like Times Square, or on the Mall in DC, so everyone can see what we’ve paid for with our energy-extravagant lifestyle), how much would it cost to constantly take the spent fuel and de-commissioned reactor parts and dump them in the ocean off Japan (how would they even notice a little bit of extra “hot” water?)?

I’m only partly kidding — I live 13 miles downwind from a nuke. I have several large TVs (but no can openers — why does sunweb have two???). I like the way I live.

As I see it, the problem is not coal, oil, gas, or nukes. The problem is not pollution. The problem is the same problem Easter Island had. The problem is the same problem yeast has: too many neighbors.

What we need is a Biblical answer.

There are too many humans — even if we found a way to make coal clean and nuclear un-radioactive, it wouldn’t solve the real problem, because the real problem is all of you — all of you are crowding me — all of you are putting a crush on my groove — all of you need to get the heck off my planet.