[Aaron]

Well if I was Mike Lynch I'd be pissed, since this is essentially the same argument he makes...

"Peak Oil is too complex to predict with any certainty."

Dr. Smil does make a very reasonable sounding argument... although in a typically arrogant way for career academics like him.

Let the critique begin...

(Oh yes - And it's pretty smug derision coming from a guy who sees nothing wrong with making up words to suit the purposes of this contrived drivel)

Peak Curiosity

By Vaclav Smil Published 12/02/2005

Predicting the end of oil era has been a venerable (albeit fruitless) pseudo-intellectual pursuit for most of the 20th century. This Nostradamian pastime regained new vigor during the late 1990s when (mostly retired geologists) Colin Campbell, Jean Laherrère, L.F. Ivanhoe, Richard Duncan and Kenneth Deffeyes -- and their groupies gathered under the WWW umbrellas of peakoil.net, peakoil.com, peakoil.org and hubbertpeak.com --- flooded the media with
catastrophist tales of imminent peak of the global oil production to be
followed by a precipitous decline of oil availability resulting in the demise
of modern civilization.

As self-appointed prophets are want to do, these
wholesalers of fear have not been cautious when outlining the
consequences. In Ivanhoe's rendering "the inevitable doomsday" will be
followed by "economic implosion" that will make "many of the world's
developed societies look more like today's Russia than the US." In
Duncan's telling there is massive unemployment, breadlines, widespread
homelessness and a catastrophic end of industrial civilization.
Kenneth Deffeyes, an experienced petroleum geologist and a former
professor at Princeton University, has been the most puzzling member of
the peak oil cult. As a scientist he must know that the real world is
permeated by uncertainties, that complex realities should not be reduced
to simplistic slogans aimed to gain media attention, and that (as even a
brief retrospective will demonstrate) making precise point predictions is a
futile endeavor.

Yet he set all of this aside and proceeded to write about
the peak of global oil production in a way that leaves no room for any
doubt ("no initiative put in place starting today can have a substantial
effect on the peak production year"), that portrays the world's energy use
merely as a matter of supply (utterly ignoring demand) and, most
incredibly, he went farther than any of his confrères by predicting not just
the year but the very day when the world's oil output was to peak.

On January 14, 2004 he wrote (albeit admitting that "it is a bit silly") that
"we can now pick a day to celebrate passing the top of the
mathematically smooth Hubbert curve: Nov 24, 2005. It falls right
smack dab on top of Thanksgiving Day 2005. It sounds a little sick
to observe a gloomy day, but in San Francisco they still observe
April 18 as the anniversary of the 1906 earthquake."

On June 5, 2004 he confirmed that "I'm still standing by my prediction that
the smoothed world production curve will peak on Thanksgiving Day,
2005." The day came and went -- so what is the verdict? In the strictest
sense Deffeyes's proposition is not provable by consulting any statistics:
oil producing countries do not report their extraction on a daily basis. And even if it worked in terms of a mathematically smooth curve we would
have to wait for many months to complete such a derivation.
But there is no need for waiting.

Amidst the ocean of uncertainties
concerning the future of global oil production there are (as Rumsfeld,
correctly, would have it) two great known unknowns: we do not know with
any satisfactory confidence the ultimate amount of oil that we will be able
to extract from the Earth's crust; and we do not know the eventual extent
of market reaction to substantial price shifts (a plain way of saying that
the elasticity of crude oil's consumption is an elusive variable). And
because we do not know either the eventual maximum of potential
(resource-limited) extraction or the actual level of (market-driven)
production we cannot know with any readily quantifiable certainty the year
(forget the day) when the global oil output will peak.

As far as resources go, peak-of-oil catastrophists believe that there is
virtually nothing left to be discovered while both the theoretical
understanding of sedimentary basin geology and the fact that large parts
of the crust (including some regions in the Middle East, most of West
Africa and huge chunks of Siberia) have yet to be explored with intensity
comparable to that of the North American drilling point to further
substantial discoveries. Acting on this, both national and multinational oil
companies are now engaged in extensive drilling aimed at adding millions
of barrels of new capacity in the coming years.

As for the market reaction, the response, eventually, does come. After
OPEC nearly quintupled its oil price in 1973 the global oil consumption
declined by merely 1.5% in 1974 and by 1976 it was nearly 4% above the
1973 level. Oil use may have been inelastic to the initial quintupling but it
surely responded to an additional near-trebling that took place between
1978 and 1981: by 1983 the world's oil consumption fell by 11%.
The same forces have been at work recently.

The day before the
Thanksgiving the price per barrel went down by 50 cents, during the
preceding month it declined by about 8% and since August it fell by about
17%; it fell again the day after Thanksgiving when it stood, in
inflation-adjusted terms, more than 20% below the historic high reached
in the spring of 1981. None of this indicates a market spooked by the
prospect of global extraction never surpassing the Thanksgiving rate!
Headlines and attention grabbing have been always about new bad
news, about caricaturing complexities and about reducing the message to
the lowest understandable denominator. But scientists should leave this
"information" niche to the National Enquirer or to Dr. Phil.

Undoubtedly, there is a finite amount of oil in the Earth's crust, but even if
we were to know it to the last drop we could not predict how much of it we
will eventually extract (much of it will be simply too expensive to get out,
or too unappealing compared to other choices). Undoubtedly, there is
continuing (and relatively slowly increasing) oil demand in affluent
economies and there is rising demand in China and India, but we do not
know how fast the global use will grow and at what levels it will start
eventually leveling off because that rate is determined not only by the
volume of recoverable oil but also by the fuel's price and by the
cleverness and rapidity of our technical advances.

Inevitably, sometime in
the future global extraction of liquid oil will start declining but we will not
be able to pinpoint that event and it may not be of much interest anyway.
The story of the modern world is, most fundamentally, one of continuous
energy transitions as the leading fuel changed from wood to coal and
then from coal to oil. But oil never dominated as much as coal did
because of the concurrent diversification into natural gas and into hydro
and nuclear electricity. These, and other sources, await further
exploitation: there is no reason to believe that we cannot eventually move
past the oil era. Difficulties of this transition should not be discounted but
they will be the best stimulants of our inventiveness and of our ability to
cope with new challenges.

Vaclav Smil is in the Faculty of Environment at the University of
Manitoba, Canada. His latest book is Creating the 20th Century; his latest
energy book is Energy at the Crossroads: Global Perspectives and
Uncertainties. A wide-ranging examination of the peak oil phenomenon
will appear in Peak Oil Forum (Aleklett, Cavaney, Flavin, Kaufman, Smil)
in January-February issue of World Watch.

If you are a producer or reporter who is interested in receiving more
information about this article or the author, please email your request to
interview@techcentralstation.com.

[holmes]

exactly sounds reasonable pampered and spoiled. None of these dolts even acknowledge thew destruction and corruption associated with giving them tenure and a phat pad. as long as they are fed the junk. Oil is getting sucked dry. I disagree with his jerk statement that vast areas have not been explored. after reading that part I stopped. pure BS.

[ashurbanipal]

I'll take a shot:

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'P')redicting the end of oil era has been a venerable (albeit fruitless) pseudo-intellectual pursuit for most of the 20th century.

[bobcousins]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Smil', 'T')he story of the modern world is, most fundamentally, one of continuous
energy transitions as the leading fuel changed from wood to coal and
then from coal to oil. But oil never dominated as much as coal did
because of the concurrent diversification into natural gas and into hydro
and nuclear electricity. These, and other sources, await further
exploitation: there is no reason to believe that we cannot eventually move
past the oil era. Difficulties of this transition should not be discounted but
they will be the best stimulants of our inventiveness and of our ability to
cope with new challenges.

[ashurbanipal]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'W')e burn as much coal as we ever did and also as much wood.

[Cerryl]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'W')e burn as much coal as we ever did

[Aaron]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'H')e devotes time to Deffeyes' Thanksgiving date but this is just trivia.

[aahala]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('bobcousins', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Smil', 'T')he story of the modern world is, most fundamentally, one of continuous
energy transitions as the leading fuel changed from wood to coal and
then from coal to oil. But oil never dominated as much as coal did
because of the concurrent diversification into natural gas and into hydro
and nuclear electricity. These, and other sources, await further
exploitation: there is no reason to believe that we cannot eventually move
past the oil era. Difficulties of this transition should not be discounted but
they will be the best stimulants of our inventiveness and of our ability to
cope with new challenges.

[kevincarter]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', ' ')the future global extraction of liquid oil will start declining but we will not be able to pinpoint that event and it may not be of much interest anyway.

[gbruno]

Smil's books are well worth reading, he has a huge reserve of personal energy.
He has, however, a personal position against PeakOil. His chapter "Against Forecasting" is terrific.
Just regard him as a resource full of useful stats, and accept that he is from the old school, he wont get on board the peak train for a while yet.

Maybe we could draw a distinction between Projection and Prediction. For a complex system like the world economy, we can make projections like:
Current trends indicate an oil scarcity. Current trends, if continued, will result in a crash, unless something intervenes. Something always intervenes. Sometimes its a dark age.

You cant predict accurately, but you can project ie point out that current trends cannot continue long.
the 1970's "Club of Rome" viewed as predictions were wrong, but viewed as projections were useful.
One major defect of the Club of Rome 1970's projections were that they put "pollution" into one category and projected death and decay. However "pollution" was too broad a term to use as a single projection.
Ironically we now do have a single "pollution" point, which does lead to death and decay: CO2 greenhouse gas. so the projection is closer to a prediction.

[Battle_Scarred_Galactico]

Wow, what a convincing arguement. Hes' won me over.

"Um Ee Oo Ah, we still use lots of coal and gas, and thats' goooood.
These things are SO complex we can't possibly know how its' going to play excactly, so THAT means theres' no problem! Plus didn't you hear, we still burn lots of coal and gas!"

[Doly]

I wonder since when "I don't know when it's going to happen." means "It's never going to happen."

There should be a name for that logical fallacy.

[entropyfails]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Doly', 'I') wonder since when "I don't know when it's going to happen." means "It's never going to happen."

There should be a name for that logical fallacy.

[Ludi]

There's no need to critique him beyond his use of ad hominems ("pseudo intellectuals").

[lateStarter]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'A')cting on this, both national and multinational oil
companies are now engaged in extensive drilling aimed at adding millions of barrels of new capacity in the coming years.