Where have all the oil optimists gone

There used to be a group of happy-go-lucky folks who thought the price of oil was always on the verge of collapsing.

Steve Forbes seemed to be their chief. He preached that the benefits of exploration would soon kick in, that all the peak oilers were nutty, and that the return of $35 a barrel was just a matter of time.
Now those voices have quieted down a bit (maybe even a lot). So why the chastening? Perhaps it’s because we’ve had some genuinely big discovery news in recent months, and crude oil has stayed expensive anyway.

As a result of all this, there is a big shift happening — at long last — in the way Wall Street thinks about oil.

The past few years have been dominated by the peak oil debate. Are we really going to run out of black gold? Is energy conservation the issue of our time? Was M. King Hubbert a prophet, or a fool?

And yet all the peak oil hubbub, and the intense debate surrounding it, has turned out to be a distraction from the immediate issue. That issue is a shortage of resources involved in the getting of oil.

Commodity Online