[Bewildebeest]

I discovered the peak oil issue only a month ago. I'm not yet familiar enough with the data to summarize the best evidence that peak oil is happening right about now. Can someone list the most cogent points?

[canis_lupus]

Welcome, Beast!

Here's the best way to summarize it:

Find out what you paid for gas last year at this point.
Compare that to what you are paying for it now.
Do some homework and guess what you will be paying for gas a year from now.

Voila! Peak Oil.

In all seriousness this is how I look at it:

The world produces ~ 84 million barrels per day and has for the last two or three years. We haven't been able to get any more out of the ground.

China and India are developing a middle class very rapidly with soaring economies. Their need for oil increases demand. When demand goes up, price goes up...like Econ 101 taught us. Hold for a moment the thought of the major oilfields are in decline. That actually makes it worse as they try to pump more oil from a shrinking source.

Refining capacity is flat -- I read somewhere that the last new refinery that was built in the US was back in the 70's.

Soooo....those three things (flat producing ability, flat refining capability, and rising demand) shows some of us to be in the early stages of Peak Oil. As time goes by, and if Peak Oil is truly here, we'll not know until it has passed.


Hurricane Katrina magnified the effects of PO. It took production and refining offline which caused the price to skyrocket. Since the world has no more spare production or refining capacity, the price and availability of petroleum products was negatively affected.

As the demand for a finite resource increases, so increases the price and lessens the availablity of the resource.

I'm a pragmatist and a green-leaning capitalist libertarian. That's pretty complex, I suppose but here's how I look at it without all the charts and graphs in front of me:

I see the world's oil thirst isn't going to go away. Short of a huge event like Bird Flu, most of the heavy users will not give up their way of life now to make it easier later. China and India are going to keep flying along and the pool of resources, oil chief among them, will get tougher.

I see an expanded presence of the superpowers in the middle east, all squabbling over the same things while East Timor burns and no one cares. I see a war based on lies that will keep us fighting until the last drop, 40 years from now.

I see the dollar sliding, shortages of weird things. Look around this site at the shortages of asphalt and carpet padding. I see the sale of SUV's slowing down drastically.

I see another terrible hurricane season starting up.

I read the pros and apply the lessons to the things I see.

At the end of the day, I sum it all up and the patterns I have been seeing all day paint an ugly picture.

I go outside, close my eyes and feel Peak Oil upon us.


+++++++++++++

I think I hit the hight points of PO but there are "old heads" among us who are calm and reasonable and there are sirens among us here, too.

Learn from all of them. Go to www.theoildrum.com for the geologists' perspectives. Visit www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net for the best, well-written site on the Web, in my opinion.

You are here looking for information about Peak OIl and its effects. You are arming yourself with knowledge. The only question that remains is: what are you doing with this knowledge?

[Zardoz]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Bewildebeest', '.')..Can someone list the most cogent points?

[nero]

Five-year Forward Price of WTI, $/b.
Source: Barclays Capital -- Figure 2
Horsnell via The Oil Drum.

[Bewildebeest]

Thanks for the answers! Just what I was looking for. I think I can feel peak oil in my bones now.