Sincere thanks to all who worked with The Oil Drum

This is a guest post by Kjell Aleklett, Professor of Physics at the Global Energy Systems Group of Uppsala University Sweden. and President of ASPO International

At the end of August, The Oil Drum website will change from an active blog into a static archive for many extremely good articles on, primarily, the history and future of oil production. During the 8 years that the website was active, its leadership did amazing work. The fact that so many influential bloggers have commented on its closure shows how influential The Oil Drum has been. I have just been contacted by a journalist from The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) who liked to discuss the many denials of Peak Oil and what the closing of The Oil Drum would mean for the Peak Oil movement. The reflections below are a part of my commentary to WSJ together with other thoughts on the future.

According to Google Trends the year 2005 was the year in which the search term ”Peak Oil” was most frequently seen. It was in that year that The Oil Drum opened its doors for submissions and that was also the same year during which the www.peakoil.com website was established. Another important website at that time was Energy Bulletin, that has now transformed into Resilience, www.resilience.org. The first time that the term ”Peak Oil” was used in the international press was in 2002 at the formation of ASPO, the Association for the Study of Peak Oil and Gas. In 2003, ASPO opened the website www.peakoil.net. During 2004 there were plans to develop the peakoil.net website in the same direction that The Oil Drum subsequently developed but the great activity at The Oil Drum lessened the need.

In the communique announcing that The Oil Drum was to close and become an archive Rembrant wrote, ”Despite our best efforts to fill this gap (number of new articles) we have not been able to significantly improve the flow of high quality articles.” This has been interpreted by some as a sign of crisis for “the Peak Oil theory” but as an academic researcher I see it completely differently. In 2002 when we formed ASPO Peak Oil was a novel research area about which a very great deal could be written. In Uppsala we chose to publish our articles in scientific journals but others chose to publish their articles at, for example, The Oil Drum. Today there are a very large number of articles describing significant facts regarding Peak Oil. This research area has matured and it has become progressively more difficult to find new, significant angles on peak oil to analyse. Currently we see that there are many people trying to assert that we do not need to worry about Peak Oil but it is interesting to note that such assertions appear mainly in newspaper articles and on blogs and not in scientific journals that are subject to peer-review.

All the activity at The Oil Drum was generated by volunteers so it is not surprising that, after 8 years of work, the people who started the site decided to convert it to an archive and do something else with their free time. On behalf of ASPO International I would like to thank sincerely all who worked with The Oil Drum – the fact that the WSJ noticed The Oil Drum’s transformation shows how enormously successful you have been. At the moment ”fracking” is the term on everyone’s lips in the way that ”Peak Oil” was in 2004, but soon we will see that drop away as fracking’s oil production does the same. Then, if not before, we will definitely see a fall in global oil production and it will be obvious to all that we have passed the peak of global production, and Peak Oil will once again be an important search term.

ASPO International will now take up the discussion whether we should expand activity at our website www.peakoil.net so that people who are interested can publish original articles there. At the same time we should not forget that there are many other websites that discuss Peak Oil and related questions. The fact that many people try to debunk Peak Oil makes it all the more important to illuminate the facts that are important for our future.

3 Comments on "Sincere thanks to all who worked with The Oil Drum"

Jerry McManus on Tue, 6th Aug 2013 6:36 pm 



“This research area has matured and it has become progressively more difficult to find new, significant angles on peak oil to analyse”

Absolutely, fundamentally, categorically: WRONG!

Peak oil is just one facet of resource depletion in general, which is itself just one aspect of global ecological overshoot.

There is a desperate need in the world for people to think of the Earth in terms of the whole system, not just energy, or just pollution, or just population.

The snobs at the Oil Drum? God bless ’em, they routinely turned their nose up at all of that and sneered about “doomerism”.

What a colossal dis-service to humanity!

I say good riddance to those egotistical idiots at TOD and thank god for blogs like http://ourfiniteworld.com/ by Gail.

bobinget on Tue, 6th Aug 2013 8:34 pm 



Gee, I hate to disagree with Jerry. (extra credit to anyone not using a screen name)

I’m truly sorry to see TOD taking an extended nap. Even though I’ve been posting in the energy sector for more then a decade, TOD was my place sane go for knowledge that served me well enough in my energy investment business. Jerry thought of TOD posters as snobs. By and large, I believed members were as sincere and polite as is possible with such controversial subject matter. BECAUSE, unlike other energy related chats on the Net, money was not the prime mover, I never wondered if someone was trying to flog shares, trading rarely came up. What I read were quite knowledgeable, sincere tutorials and comments by individuals with nothing to gain save the satisfaction of making the world more livable. In fact the quality of information garnered from TOD, in particular from retired petroleum engineers and others in the oil bidness, is still some of the best around.

I’m here to tell ya, believing as I do in AGW and being a full time energy investor pulls a person in many directions. Had TOD avoided (talking about) the planet’s biggest problem, Climate Change, they would be still publishing, no doubt with contributions from Mid Sized E&P’s and oil service companies. But…
being the kind of folks, scientists, engineers, Blue Collar Workers, there was no point in avoiding eye contact with one’s self in a mirror, it has to be said.

Is it guilt, greed, I don-know. All I can be certain of is this. Without corporate sponsors, even advertising it’s impossible, in the oil&gas bidness to sustain a clean, honest web site like The Oil Drum.

Matt Charles on Wed, 7th Aug 2013 12:58 am 



I fully agree with everything bobinget said. Well said..