The missing link in Mexico’s declining oil production

In a miraculous feat of journalistic legerdemain this morning, a lengthy, detailed front-page article in the Wall Street Journal reports on declining production at Mexico’s giant Cantarell oil field, without once ever mentioning the words “peak oil.”

Reporter David Luhnow manages to achieve this while at the same time providing a textbook illustration of precisely why peak oilers are so worried that maximum production is nigh.


…It is instructive to compare this article with the happy-go-lucky piece written by Jad Mouwad in the New York Times exactly one month ago, which, on the one hand, dismissed peak oil as “still a minority view, held largely by a small band of retired petroleum geologists and some members of Congress, that oil production has peaked, but the theory has been fading.”

Mouwad’s contention was that new technology and investment, spurred by high oil prices, would allow older fields to keep producing for decades to come, and would enable hitherto uneconomic sources — oil sands, oil shale — to join the production lines. There is undoubtedly a good bit of truth to that theory — the power of the price mechanism is a mighty thing — but it certainly doesn’t negate the premise that the era of cheap oil is over. But while the Journal makes some unkind comments as to how Pemex is far behind the state-of-the-art in terms of oil-recovery technology and has bungled its management of the fields in many ways, the unavoidable conclusion of the article is that the decline, even if it can be slowed, cannot be stopped.

Salon.com