by Canuck » Tue 19 Oct 2004, 18:14:57
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('pip', 'I') realize this may not be true, but I haven't seen any chart of world spare capacity over the last few decades. To be convinced of peak oil, I will need to see a failure of the market to respond to increase supply within two years.
Peak oil can be reduced to a common sense argument. It is a simple idea. By definition fossil fuels are a finite resource. We may not know precisely how much there is, but we do know it is finite. Divide the resource roughly in half.
Unless we are prepared to believe that the economy does not first exploit the easiest to find, the largest fields, the best oil, the cheapest oil - an absurd notion - we know there is one half that is cheap and easy to exploit and another half that will be difficult and expensive to exploit. As long as we work our way from best to worst in any resource, the depletion curve must look like a Bell curve.
Never mind trying to sort through all the numbers to determine whether we are approaching Peak.
Why on earth are we drilling wells in the deep ocean off the Gulf of Mexico? Why would anyone invest $100 billion in the tar sands? Why is Kerr-McGee running those ads? Why are we running short of the highest quality oil? Why are we building pipelines at enormous cost through unstable regions? Why did the Americans invade Iraq?
If we aren't exploiting the hard half of the resource right now, I'd sure like to know what it will be like when it really gets tough. We would not be doing the extraordinary things we are doing if we were not at least very close to peak.