Peak Oil is right answer to wrong question: John Kemp

In a trivial sense, the peak oil theory must be true. Like all the best things, oil is something they don’t make any more. It takes thousands of years of sedimentation, heat and pressure to convert long-dead plants and animals into kerogen then various hydrocarbons (natural gas, crude oil, bitumen, lignite and coal). The volume of crude oil in earth’s crust is fixed; at some point extraction will peak and then eventually run out.

The problem with peak oil is that it is the right answer but to the wrong question.
As technology improves, there is plenty of conventional crude to be discovered in formerly inaccessible areas such as the ocean floors and the Arctic. Technology also exists to develop unconventional sources (such as bitumen and kerogen) into oil, and to turn natural gas and coal into liquid fuels that can be used to power cars and aeroplanes.

Global hydrocarbon reserves are more than enough to last hundreds of years, long after combusting them has cooked the planet, if fears about global warming prove correct. The real questions are how much it will cost to develop them and how to mitigate the impact on the earth’s atmosphere.

Most techniques are expensive compared with drilling and refining conventional crude, though not excessively so ($40-120 per barrel). They tend to be energy intensive (so the net energy gain is lower than with conventional crude). But they are workable and feasible.

Blinded by their obsession with physical availability of conventional oil, peak oilers miss the much larger questions: how much will these alternative hydrocarbons cost and what happens to the environment if we combust them all and don’t find a way to trap the CO2?

Reuters